Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, it’s been a funny transition for the game business. Epic started out making shareware games, distribute it digitally, but as the first 3D games took off like Wolfenstein and Doom from id Software, and then Unreal from us took off to reach a huge audience of millions of users, we had to go into retail stores. So we worked with a retail publisher and they made a box and they put CD-ROMs in the box, and then the world started transitioning back to digitally. And that transition didn’t start well, right? The initial transition of gaming to digital was all but torrent, all piracy and the other horror stories about games that would sell a hundred thousand copies but have 2 million users because most people pirated it. And then Steam came along and introduced digital distribution and made digital distribution of legit games so convenient that most players moved away from piracy towards that, and their practices were then followed by others, and the early digital industry took form. Yeah, it’s fascinating. I mean, pirates do lead the way for innovation, the same as the story of Spotify. Basically, I think, most people when they derive value from things like video games, want to pay for those video games, they just want it to be easy. And so the same thing with music, with Spotify. But maybe just staying on the 90s, there are going to be a lot of indie game developers who will listen to us talking today. Can you go back to that mindset and try to derive some wisdom and advice to those folks when you were just a solo developer or maybe just a small group of people creating your early games that eventually became this huge gaming company. But in the early days, what were you going through? What were the ups and downs? What did it take to stay strong and persevere? Well, one of the critical things that Epic always worked hard to do was to make something different that nobody else was doing, and to try to satisfy a small audience rather than competing globally with the game juggernauts. Back in the 1990s, Epic was new, but Electronic Arts and Activision and the other big publishers had been around for a decade, and they were huge companies. It had giant retail distribution networks. If I tried to make a game and then convinced them to publish it, I doubt I could have had a chance. And I doubt that even if I had made a successful game, that I would’ve made much money from it, though they might have. And so the really unique angle to Epic then was shareware. And that was just the idea that if we distribute our game differently, then we can reach a much larger audience than these bigger competitors by virtue of this first episode of the game being free. It was kind of the advent of what later became free to play. And the logic of that is just as true now as it was then. It’s, if the thing is free and anybody can get into it, then it’s going to spread from friend to friend as people bring their real world friends into the games they’re playing and you have the opportunity to build up a community around that. So the other lesson there was just minimize the friction of people getting into your game, make it easy to get into and make it fun. I think the other, well, I was very fortunate. ZZT was a funny game. It was not much like any other game. It had much worse graphics because it was all just text characters, smiley faces and other Greek letters and things participating in this game simulation. They were kind of iconic representations of characters rather than real ones. And this was decades into the age of real graphical games with interesting graphics. And so it wasn’t even trying to compete in that area, but it was able to compete in a different area, which is that it wasn’t just the three games that I’d made and shipped as a trilogy that were successful and drove the success of the product. It was the fact that I released an editor and there was a whole community around it. And you see that trend has repeated itself, like there was, ZZT was one of it. Before that, there was Bill Budge’s Pinball construction set. That was a 1980s Apple game that let users build their own pinball tables. And since then, you’ve had some of the world’s most successful games follow that path. Like Minecraft, you can build your own stuff.…

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