Developer relations through East Side Games’ lens

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With the value of brands and third-party intellectual property (IP) growing across the mobile games world, how can developers find and work with the market leaders, trending brands and create a hit game?

PocketGamer.biz sat down with Wally Nguyen, the Chief Revenue Officer of East Side Games to talk athe studio’s work with game developers around the world and what the company looks for when it comes to developer ‘partners’ who can move beyond the ‘work for hire’ mindset.

Wally Nguyen brings over 20 years of experience to ESG, with a proven track record in gaming and tech, Nguyen has driven the development of high-revenue games using top IPs like The Office and RuPaul’s Drag Race. Before joining East Side Games, Wally played a crucial role in Skillz’s successful public listing and co-founded mNectar, where he pioneered the Playable Ad format.

PocketGamer.biz: Who are you and what do you do?

Wally Nguyen: I’m the Chief Revenue Officer at East Side Games (ESG), Canada’s largest publicly traded games company. As CRO, I oversee Developer Relations and new IP/Brand Partnerships. My other divisions include Growth, Ad Monetsation, and Legal.

ESG focuses on high-quality performative mobile games made with globally recognised Intellectual Property (IP) and brands such as The Office, Squishmallows, Doctor Who, Star Trek:Lower Decks, Power Rangers, AEW, RuPaul’s Drag Race, Trailer Park Boys, and Funko Pop. As a Publisher, we partner with developers to make and run these games.

Why are developers important to you and East Side Games?

We work with the absolute best IPs in the world for games, and that means we must source, vet, and partner with the best studios and developers to make these games – hence Developer Relations being its own line of business focus. 

Highly capable developers are the backbone of our business, as they are for the entire games industry. There is the added benefit that developers are some of the most creative and passionate people out there, so I thoroughly enjoy my work with them.

Our games have to launch with the utmost stability and best game metrics out of the gates and be run for many years to serve loyal and excited fan bases and players across the globe.

So, I have to find partner developers that can not only make the game but run Live Ops for the long haul, generate strong revenues, and deliver an ongoing fun experience for players. 

To serve this purpose, ESG provides some of the most competitive business terms in the games industry, where we fund the co-development of our games with developers and also provide them a revenue share. I believe this helps align us from the start. 

What are some key things you look for in potential developer partners?

• Track record in key genres: How many games has the studio made and shipped, which ones stood out, and why. What is the developer most proud of? This is really important to know as we want to align values and principles when we embark on a game together.
• Key Metrics: What are some KPIs on performant games the developer has made across time scales, such as average revenue per daily average user (ARPDAU) and daily average user (DAU) over two to five years. There are many more questions, spanning across 80+ questions I run through with potential developer partners. I prefer teams that are manically on top of metrics and know them like “the back of their hands”, as the saying goes.
• Credibility: How is the developer handling the questions that I mentioned above? How open and honest can we be together? This is important as the game development and live ops journey will always have some challenges on the way to delivering a hit, and I need to be able to have straightforward conversations with partners when necessary. Conversations are always easy when things are going well, but how will we navigate challenging situations together?
• Company stability and leadership: How long has the company been around? How solid is their balance sheet? Who are the star players on their team and what is their personal track record? 

What makes selecting and vetting developer partners so challenging?

One of the most challenging questions to answer is, at least at early cycles of the process, which games has the developer actually made, as opposed to taking it over midstream?

There are many different types of work done on games, from porting to rescue to live ops. However, the type of experience that I am most interested in is what I call “soup to nuts” game development – 100% of the game build from start to finish. I refer to these developers as “full capability studios”. 

“Full capability” means that the developer has proven experience in design, art, and engineering, etc. ESG looks for partners – those who can lead with us. While we can provide support through product oversight, narrative writing, game balances, and more. We do not want to be making all the decisions. We want our developers to take ownership of the key decisions and own the game’s overall performance.

Oftentimes, developers are tempted to claim that a port or a live ops game project they worked on was a full development project. I can’t tell you how many times I have heard four – six different developers claim credit for the same game! 

I also believe one of the hardest evolutions that up-and-coming developers face is growing and evolving from a “work-for-hire” business model to becoming a full-capability studio.

Many times, I find full capability studios that still operate from a work-for-hire mentality. They will deliver to specifications, but it’s to ESG’s specification. While this may sound great, there are times when we ourselves can be wrong or we miss an opportunity. If we are the only ones writing the spec, we are leaving ourselves open to risk and miss out on the best ideas.

Thus, I want to find genre-expert developers who know their craft and can not only partner with ESG, but also know when to take the lead in the relationship and tell us how the game should be made or be run. I firmly believe that this type of collaboration is what leads to hits, where 1+1=3.

How do you view the mobile games market for developers today versus a couple of years ago?

The mobile games market has obviously been on a downturn over the last couple of years and East Side Games adjusted our strategy accordingly. During this time we strategically chose to go 100% IP games, compared to our previous mix of IP and original titles. This shift reduced our total game production pipeline and thus our capacity for developer partners. Today, we are focused on fewer releases, with a stronger emphasis on titles that have much higher performance potential and larger budgets.

ESG’s moves generally reflected the market’s, in that we went from many to fewer, but with much larger investments.

I believe the impact on developers is that, with the volume of game projects and deals dropping at such large rates, the supply of developer and development resources now exceeds the demand. On top of that, with many games getting cancelled, developers are in a tougher position than ever.

I have seen some studios retrench and re-strategise, with some needing to revert to work-for-hire projects with guaranteed funding, rather than taking on co-development projects with revenue share upside (i.e.,  taking on risk). I sense that the work-for-hire side of the development market has grown significantly. 

For studios that can maintain their ability and capacity to take on full games, it may be harder to sustain. However,I believe that if they can deliver a hit game,  the upside of the revenue share will be a huge reward.

However, the type of experience that I am most interested in is what I call “soup to nuts” game development – 100% of the game build from start to finish. I refer to these developers as “full capability studios”. 

We remain committed to co-developing full games with clear blockbuster potential.

Do you have any recommendations on how to stand out as a developer?

My methods are a bit more old school in that I prefer to meet potential partners in person, rather than only relying on documentation, data, and Requests for Proposal (RFPs). 

While the latter is certainly important for due diligence, there is still nothing that beats sitting in a room together to share ideas and vision or having lunch together and getting a sense how a working relationship will evolve as we spend time together.

We work with studios from every part of the world, from Vietnam to Finland to Australia to Argentina to Canada. While cultures may vary, we all share the language of games together. 

My one recommendation: Get out there! Attend the conferences. Show up to the panels. Shake the hands and take the meetings. Play the long game and get to know everyone and make sure everyone knows you.

There are many times when I float a new game idea or have one in mind. I’ll usually call up a developer friend to suss it out. These friends are people I have built relationships with because we met somewhere at some point. We would have never met if neither of us showed up. 

Are there any “red flags” that you would want to warn developers about?

Don’t oversell.

That is my one key recommendation.

Show what you have and certainly be proud of your work. But please refrain from overstating KPIs or sugar coating results. This only erodes trust and credibility, which is the cornerstone of partnerships, new and ongoing.

More often than not, I have found myself enamored with developers who openly talk about failed attempts, the lessons learned, and their countless tries until they got it right. On the same token, I lose interest when presented with a slide with cherry-picked success stories with no blemishes.

Do you have any examples of a good developer experience, when it comes to selecting a new partner?

One of our newest developer partners is Broken Circle Studios. 

What was refreshing about this particular studio is that, despite having a long list of popular and famous IPs and partners, they immediately pointed out which games they built from scratch and which ones they took over or assisted with. 

They also clearly called out which genres they are experts in and most passionate about. 

The timing worked out perfectly, as the genres they specialise in aligned with ESG’s needs.

This level of candour was instrumental in setting a high level of trust and comfort as we embarked on a partnership together.

Extra note: Our first few meetings were over video, but we didn’t formalise the partnership until after we met in person at GDC.