Harold Ryan, the CEO of ProbablyMonsters, talked about his career, the company's philosophy, choosing the right tech, AAA games, and more.
ProbablyMonsters Inc. is a new type of game company that builds AAA development studios working on world-class games. The company was originally formed in 2016 and announced only a half year ago. One of their goals is to attract senior-level developers who have worked on blockbuster projects with major games, entertainment, and technology companies.
The first two ProbablyMonsters studios are Cauldron Studios and Firewalk Studios. Led by Dave Matthews, Cauldron Studios is now working on a narrative-driven AAA game, while Firewalk Studios, led by Tony Hsu, is developing a multiplayer AAA game. Both studio teams are in milestone development for their first projects, and both games have been separately signed with respective major publishers.
Harold Ryan, a leader with over 20 years of experience, who is credited with generating over $5B in revenues from blockbuster franchises, is the company's founder and CEO. After leading Halo and Destiny as CEO and President of Bungie and managing teams at Microsoft, Ensemble Studios, and FASA Studios, Ryan found a better way to build and sustain AAA studios and games.
“By offering a new model for game creation, our ProbablyMonsters studios and platform team are attracting industry-leading talent that is highly skilled and creatively diverse,” said Ryan in a statement. “Our growth testifies to the value of empowering the development teams in our ProbablyMonsters studios to do what they love in an environment that puts people, culture, and creativity first.”
The company has already hired 100 employees, and now ProbablyMonsters collectively holds experience from over 40 leading companies, 30 blockbuster game franchises, and top film and technology projects.
Harold Ryan, the company's leader, was kind enough to join our editor-in-chief Kirill Tokarev to talk about his journey, the company's philosophy, choosing the right tech, AAA games, and more.
Can you tell us about yourself and how you got into where you are now?
Looking back at it, it definitely seems like a crazy journey. Speaking of my background, I was actually programming my own games when I was 10-11 years old on my dad's computer -- he was a computer programmer all the way back to punch cards and other stuff. And so before I started with the games at Microsoft, I was actually engineering and consulting. When I started at Microsoft, the first game I worked on was called Hellbender.
I think the thing that let me succeed ultimately was that I was always focused on my team, on the people, on enabling and empowering them. And I also think partly because of my approach to problem-solving. I always try to be as upfront as I can and make sure everyone has a room where ideas are building in their heads. For me, it's always been important to build trust and respect people.
When I took a break from Bungie, which was at the end of a really long, long phase of hard work and success, I spent the first year thinking about what I should've learned from the past 20 years. From my first day as a software tester through shipping a couple of major updates for Destiny, there were a whole bunch of things that succeeded massively. I wondered, what were all the things you should have learned along the way? What's in that, what do I have to do next? And so for me, it really came down to wanting to build a more reliable place for people to make games and that resulted in ProbablyMonsters as a builder of game development studios, where the goal is to try to setup more intrinsic elements of the studios as they get built -- so that it's a long-lasting, positive culture, a place for people to really build games they are proud of. And that turned into what ProbablyMonsters is now, how it's structured, how we approach what we do.
You can't do it now because of the pandemic, but when you walk into the front door of ProbablyMonsters today, on the wall you can see what are currently three primary cultural pillars of the company -- trust and be trusted, be respectful and expect respect and be an approachable and accountable leader. We came to those through thinking about what will solve all the things that can go wrong when building something with a large group of people or any number of people. And what do people deserve in their career and workplace? What could we do to make it more likely that people share and collaborate, feel comfortable -- all things that help teams do their best work, feel trusted and respected and trust people around them. I believe that culture is a thing you have to talk about and you have to write it down and be open to.
How do you approach the recruiting process? What are the keys to attracting talented people?
One of the goals for the studios is to have the capital to make it a reliable and predictable career for people so that the paychecks and benefits are there. It doesn't remove the possibility some projects may not make it and some studios will shift and people won't like it, but the company should have intrinsic stability.
I think the other thing for me that I've seen over the years is if you're gonna pour your heart, your soul, your talent into something, for most people it's meaningful when you can share it and the more people you can share it with the better. And I've been fortunate enough with my teams in the past, we've built things that have been shared a lot and shared by a lot of people. And I know for some people who joined the team who hadn't equal opportunities that other teams - and there's plenty of talented teams everywhere - but who looked at myself and some of the leaders we have on board already at ProbablyMonsters -- it's a place where they believe that they can contribute to culture and help us make it and keep it positive and a place where they believe in their work. It's also the place to find the right partners, where we'll work to build good relationships with our audiences and hopefully allow the work to be shared in a meaningful positive way.
Another thing that's interesting for us - and it's about culture - the real goal for me is for those studio leadership teams to have a full understanding of what it means to run a business, and the IP, and publishers and partners. Also, to evolve into their own vision of culture for their studio where you get people into the stability of a much larger family or business.
My focus is to help mix each studio at a size where everyone knows everyone and has a personal relationship and where everyone understands and trusts that we're all a part of it, collaborating and working well and that they see and feel that they are getting support while they're building.
How do you approach team building? How do you keep people focused and interested in what they're building?
I think inside each team, whether it's a game studio developing a game or working on another milestone, they have their own internal leadership team. They're driving through their milestones and development plan. Whether one project team wants to have meetings in one way or communicate only in writing or another other team wants to do everything face to face, everyone has clear expectations because when you interview with that studio or when you're on that team, you only have to learn one way to work. That's one of the main things I mentor in leadership teams -- to be predictable to the team.
If they know what to expect and if they're not surprised by how the team works or how things evolve, and if they have a voice as that team is building and learning its team culture and evolving it, they're doing it as a small group, and they have complete control over how they evolve.
It’s critical that it's not only that they're willing to agree to the culture but they are willing to foster it. The only reason not to hire someone really talented is if they refuse to be respectful and trusted and approachable.
Using existing game engines or building a new technical solution? What do you think about the two options?
Start by picking an idea, building it. Then, work with the game director to find the vision, help them understand what kind of team that requires, what the tech roadmap required to deliver that idea is, and where things like that could be expensive. Can Unity do this and can Unreal do this? Is this an interactive idea that nowadays the Stadia will support, or is this a core console PC title?
Define the experience you want to deliver to a player and then openly challenge the existing engines whether they’re capable of delivering that core experience. If they are, then they are the right choice. If they are not, then you try to build your own engine and you have to understand the time commitment it takes to get there, the lack of functionality while you build it, and all of that contributes to greenlighting a project.
I think the golden rule for anyone at ProbablyMonsters is to build a great team, a great culture that’s going to last, and then, do amazing things together.
There's a lot you can do with plugins and rewriting small pieces of license code. More and more teams are starting from scratch. Part of it comes down to the team size. I've led teams that grew from 40 to over 500 in the past and shipped games with 60 people and 80 people and 100 people along the way on the team. There's the difference in what it feels like when you walk into the building, what it's like to interact with people, how well do you know everyone that you're building this thing together with.
Do anything you need to do to keep the team smaller but still big enough to hit the quality and get things done. Last year, we had just under 30 people on the team, but we had other freelancers and contractors working around the world on the game in that milestone. I think one of the other outcomes of keeping your core full-time internal team smaller is you have to engage with people outside of your team to get your work done.
What does AAA actually mean today? What are the core ideas that drive AAA?
To me, the biggest thing as a game developer I hope my teams see in AAA is just an expectation that we will iterate, polish, work well, stay focused, and remove the things that distract us from a positive experience. To me, the first thing that means is that we are going to focus on identifying the player's experience and we're going to do everything we can to understand it and then work really hard to deliver that without distractions to the player.
It's also about the level of support the company can get. I talked to indie teams and so many of them work for no pay or benefits or but at ProbablyMonsters the goal once we had funding has always been and will always be to bring people and have great benefits, pay a fair wage, and have predictable compensation. We are constantly managing 1-year, 2-year, 3-year, any-year business plans, and working to ensure that compensation for people is predictable.
It's also important that we are making games that really hit the game director's vision for the experience and we are doing enough to carry that forward. At the same time, we are working really hard to be responsible with our budgets. Part of building a predictable career for people is to control budgets, to make sure you spend money wisely.
What do you think about developing games as services? Should games have more hooks to keep players in?
I've always loved building games as a type of connection between the team, the game, and the audience, and keeping that connection as tight as possible. Online is going to evolve over time, and being connected means that a game can evolve and that people who are playing the game will meet their needs and solve their issues because game design is all about creating something delightful.
The development cycle for building cinematic pieces as a hook is so long, so expensive and hard to do -- and consumers don't seem, right now, in the current models at least, they don't engage enough to pay for it, even with DLCs. However, with less used game sales going on you have more revenue coming to creators of the game, and that will keep evolving over time. I'm an absolute fan of cinematic games, but to me, the only thing that matters is having one strong view on the culture the team wants to build. I want them to make great games, games they love, games they are proud of. And whether it's a cinematic game or online -- everything from highly cinematic to no cinematics and just straight service-based games -- all of those are exciting for me.