Moving Away from Factory Lines - Jörg Tittel Interview at DevGaMM

Audio transcription

"We are here in beautiful Cascais for the DevGAMM. It's my first time here, it's the second day of the event and I'm here joined by Jörg.
Thank you so much for joining us once again. We had you for The Last Worker, but before we talk The Last Worker, later today you have a panel which is about hope, I guess. What can you share here before the panel as a tease?
Yeah, hope out of the rubble. I mean, we are currently experiencing quite a big crisis in the world, in the industry."

"I'm not going to go into politics, but it's a dire time and it's only about to get more interesting in the next few years.
But the game industry, you know, is in crisis. We've had about 30,000 layoffs, I think, since last year.
I just learned from a couple of friends that they've been laid off from Thunderful this morning.
So it's just happening, it's continuing. But it is a very similar situation to what was happening to the film industry in the 60s."

"So we're seeing the collapse of the studio system. That's what's happening right now.
And in the 1960s, at the beginning of the 60s, 45 million people would go to the cinema each week.
And by the end of the 60s in America, and by the end of the 60s, the number dropped down to 15 million.
And we're seeing the same thing, especially in the console space now."

"We're only at the beginning of those 60s now for the games industry, but that's what we're seeing.
Also, films were made on factory lines, especially back then. You know, you would be assigned a job at a studio.
Studio lot three, go over there, do another night, daytime scene, and you didn't even know what movie you were working on.
You were just assigned those jobs. This is exactly how video games are made."

"So just do a texture map for a lizard over there and whatever. I mean, it's just like no one even knows what they're working on anymore.
No one gets to actually finish the games that they're working on. No one gets to actually play them. No one cares.
The AAA games, 1 to 5% of the actual player base actually finishes any of them.
So people are creating what is called content now, but none of that actually gets appreciated enough."

"And the people that make it don't get appreciated either.
So how do we get out of that? I think we can also take a look back at the film industry in the 60s.
How did they get out of that? How did they get out of this? They stopped making films on factory lines.
You suddenly had Spielberg, Coppola, Scorsese, blaxploitation films deciding to work in and with studio assets at best, if need be, but otherwise make things produce independently and also scale up when they needed to scale up."

"So work with small core production and development teams. And that is starting to happen more and more in games.
And this is going to be our future. So I think out of this mess, we will see the Jaws, the Star Wars, the Apocalypse Now, the 2001, the video games, and it's going to be an exciting time.
How does that relate to, you know, you said from $45 million to $15 million going to the cinema. Is that happening?
Would you say that is happening in terms of video game conception and buying games, that people are buying fewer games?
Or is it about the way they spend their time and the way they understand what, as you said, what a AAA game is and how they are all about content differently?
Well, I mean, if you take a look at Concord, I mean, that game cost $400 million at an enormous or something, I'm not sure of the exact number, but definitely several hundreds of millions, massive marketing campaign, you know, a supposedly loyal player based on PlayStation, etc. But it sold maybe a couple of 10,000 copies."

"And so, you know, people are either the market is oversaturated, there's too much of it, or people just, or maybe it was too generic, maybe it was too samey, maybe it came eight years too late. Who knows?
But times have changed. Like we, you know, consoles as well are stagnating in terms of their sales.
Xbox is not, you know, has sold less hardware than MetaQuest has sold."

"So, and people consider VR to be niche. So I'm like, all right, cool.
So maybe consoles are niche. Are they becoming niche?
PS5 is an incredible hardware. PS5 Pro is not exactly selling out at the moment.
So is this, and of course, we're only getting more and more streaming based, more and more cloud based, etc."

"Also to the detriment of a lot of things, you know, for games to suddenly, like, overnight to get deleted off one of those stores, which are not actually stores, there are landfills of content at this point. What's happening?
So the public feels like things have, games have less value at the moment, which is a problem."

"You know, we, you know, the humans that pour years and years of their lifetime into something are worth it, and their time should be appreciated.
But if it's all being spat through the same funnel, regardless of budget, regardless of scale, regardless of ambition, regardless of quality, even if on Steam, you have to share a shelf with Sex with Hitler 1, 2, and 3, which is actually a real game, by the way."

"Those games exist. Then, you know, is this really a store?
Like, would you go to a supermarket and have rotten tomatoes next to, you know, fresh ones?
You're like, I'm not sure. Which one should I go for?
No, no. I mean, if they offer, if they put rotten tomatoes on the shelf, it's not a store."

"You go to the manager and you're like, hang on, guys, you're selling a bunch of garbage.
So we're in this weird reality now where there's no human curation, or very little.
It's all algorithmically driven, and you go like, oh, the market will decide.
It's like, okay, sure."

"But, you know, we have had a, we've had an election in America just now where the market decided on who's going to win.
And that's not to say that people, you know, the masses are stupid, but the masses are ill-informed, and the masses are confused, and the masses are angry.
And we can rise out of this."

"We can rise out of this by making things that are beautiful and inspiring and aspirational and intense and delightful.
And I think that games have lost their plot.
I mean, they've lost, you know, I was hosting the public pitch last night here at DevGAMM.
You know, I was walking around the show floor."

"You know, I know we're making indies here.
I know we don't have the biggest budgets.
But I think a lot of developers have also lost track of what makes a game fun.
You know, you're looking at these games, and it's like you're listening to a five-minute pitch by someone, and they can barely describe to you how it plays and what you're going to experience, what you're going to feel when you're playing that."

"Like, I don't care about what features you have.
The features are bullshit.
No one cares about features.
You're not selling a car."

"I don't care how fucking fast it accelerates and drives and wears around corners.
No one gives a shit.
Like, is it going to make you feel like a PowerPoint driver?
Is it going to make you feel like you love nature again?
What is it actually doing to you as a player?
And none of the candidates last night were giving you that."

"And that's interesting because we are the greatest entertainment in the world.
We're the ultimate art form.
How do we change the dynamics again where we stop talking about content and features and how to waste people's time, and how do we start giving people joy and delight?
And I think that's going to start to have to happen now."

"So I think it's hope.
It sounds like I'm being very, very critical because I am, because it's scary.
It's hope.
But it's dark right now, for sure."

"You briefly mentioned Meta and VR and, of course, The Last Worker, released on VR as well.
And it's interesting about the numbers and the stores and how Meta distributes games and how we saw Meta going up with the MetaQuest 2.
And then we were expecting it to sort of be almost a monopoly and then to reign over all VR with MetaQuest 3."

"But it took them a while to get there.
But now we're getting a bunch of games, interesting games.
How do you feel about that?
Please tell me a little bit about the feedback you got from The Last Worker, the experience with that game, and then how you feel about VR nowadays, that it looks like it's the third, fourth comeback of VR in a few years."

"Yeah, I mean, VR, for people who ask me, do you think VR will ever take off, I go, do you think theater will ever take off?
I mean, it's there, isn't it?
It's doing its thing."

"Is it the mainstream?
Does everyone in the world go to the theater?
No.
Does everyone have to do VR in order for it to be valid as a business?
No."

"We don't have to.
We are multifaceted as a human race enough where not everything has to be a fucking iPhone in order for it to be valid because we don't work for VCs."

"We're humans.
We're individuals.
I'm not here to ensure that my product is the number one in the world.
I don't care.
It's completely irrelevant."

"So, yeah, VR is here to stay.
Immersive entertainment is only going to keep evolving more and more.
I mean, the feedback from The Last Worker, it's a game I'm incredibly proud of."

"We were the only game in competition at the Venice Film Festival.
We were nominated for endless awards and blah, blah, blah.
It's a game that we made during the pandemic.
Again, it was extremely ambitious for a very tiny budget as well with incredible actors, et cetera."

"It's a game that I personally feel, and I lost the plot in a sense, that it's a game that when I played it myself, I was just like, oh, aren't I clever and don't look at my art and look at the incredible.
Don't you love the writing too?
Check it out."

"And it's like, and the reviews are really good, et cetera.
It's just, it's not fun.
And that's not to say that games have to be fun.
I mean, it's Frostpunk fun."

"It's intense.
It's an incredible title, but it's like, I mean, it's inside fun.
Inside is compelling as hell.
It knows exactly what it is, for instance."

"And with The Last Worker, I felt that we succumbed to the pressure of having to make something that has to have a certain play length.
I personally wanted to make it a two-hour game, but with pressures from parties I won't mention now, I had to make it longer, et cetera."

"So it's like, I think it would have been much better as a two-hour experience.
All right.
And when you take a look at games like Mouthwashing, for instance, which is brilliant, by the way, by Critical Effects, which is a two, three-hour or whatever experience, it's like, yeah, and it's extremely successful."

"It's like, yeah, people are sick of spending, wasting a lot of time on that stuff.
Specifically on VR.
Or anywhere, anywhere."

"No, that's a flat game I just mentioned.
So it's like it's happening in flat.
People don't want to have long games anymore.
They don't."

"You know, you had the head of, former head of RGG, Ryuga Gotoku's studio, you know, the Lucky Dragons studio, saying like this week, like his next game that he's doing now with his new studio is going to have a small player map."

"We don't have to do these big things anymore.
No one cares.
And so that was one big takeaway from that.
Then I did a spin-off at the same time for the Playdate, Skew."

"Skew, yeah.
Yeah, with Frédérick Raynal, the creator of Alone in the Dark, you know, the inventor.
Like Doom, now that we have John Romero for Like Doom, like in the 3D."

"Oh, interesting.
Retroway or Star Fox.
Yes.
And it's a game that I've spent much more time playing than The Last Worker, even though it's a tiny little Playdate title."

"And to me, it was like a palate cleanser in the middle of the, you know, the end of the pandemic, at the end of working on The Last Worker, I wanted to make something that was just delight, that was just fun."

"And on the Playdate, and I realized, oh, this is what I want to make.
I just want to make things that give you this kinetic feeling of being part of something, whether it's like a movement, whether it's a storytelling, whether it's an emotion, it doesn't matter, but it has to move you."

"And so that's how we did C-Smash, right?
C-Smash VRS, which is like playing squash in space with incredible music, et cetera.
Got a Golden Joystick nomination."

"Was it on PS5 as well?
It came out on PS5 as a flat, as a non-VR game, at end of September with hybrid online multiplayers.
You can play it full body in VR versus third person on PlayStation 5, which is fucking cool."

"And so doing that was a great start for my new company, Rapid Eye Movers.
And now I'm about to do some really cool stuff.
Some really cool stuff in games, but also with A Winter's Journey."

"Oh yeah, there's a film, A Winter's Journey, starring John Malkovich and others.
Sony Pictures Classics are releasing it next year.
It's based on Schubert's Winterreise, his song cycle."

"24 songs told in 24 continuous shots.
And we worked with Media Molecule in Guilford in the UK.
We used Dreams, a bespoke version of Dreams, to build, design, and also animate sets in the film."

"So that was a great collaboration with PlayStation as well.
Do you have a fixed release date for that one?
Don't yet, but we will be announcing it early next year.
All right, closing one, coming back briefly to The Last Worker and the dystopian message that we were talking about."

"The Last Worker came out way before the explosion of AI.
So I don't know if it was foretelling.
You were talking more about automation, not AI.
So how do you feel about that now?
We see what AI is doing, what AI can do, what AI can help you with in terms of an agent that can help you."

"But also yesterday I was talking with Maria Boris about writing and writing dialogue and the way, of course, we had strikes for writers in both movies and video games.
How do you feel about it?
I mean, progress is unstoppable, and progress is not necessarily positive."

"Not necessarily.
If you take a look at the people in charge of big tech and now the most powerful man on the planet, Elon Musk, I mean, his intentions are not necessarily good."

"I mean, is he self-obsessed?
Is he just a nerd that is power-hungry?
Who knows what his problem is, but he certainly has one, and the problem is that problem is us now, and it's ours."

"But AI, we've always used AI.
We've always used tools.
Actually, every single piece of art ever made was made with tools.
The first cave painting, someone had to invent the flame, and technology was used for that, and fire, and light the cave and have tools to scrape or paint something onto the wall, etc."

"The tools have since disappeared, but the art remains, which tells you who's in charge in the long term.
I think it's us, the artists.
It's not the toolmakers."

"Over the last few years, unfortunately, we've become the tools of the toolmakers, and that's something that we have to flip around again.
I believe that, as you can see now, for instance, with X, having already, or Twitter, formerly known as Twitter, dipping down to number 60th spot on the charts on the App Store almost overnight, it took this, it takes a dramatic turn for the worse for people to understand what they've been dealing with all along, what we've been sucked into."

"We've all been part of the problem. We're all in there.
AI is a tool, and it can be used for good, for independent game developers to have key hands-on people, but not have to then hire 40, 50, 60 people down the road, and then only to have to fire them again down the road because they can use AI as a way to expand their canvas."

"I'm all for it. Michelangelo, when he did the Sistine Chapel, had a bunch of boys climbing up ladders and falling off of them and dying potentially, etc., as well, for years on end.
Instead of those boys on ladders, using AI to do that, to actually replicate what I've already created myself on a smaller scale onto a huge canvas, fuck yeah, right?
Sure. Why not?
So I think AI is not necessarily bad, but if it starts replacing, taking hold at the intent level, if it actually replaces intent, if it's only there to make content, then it's death for us all."

"But I think the public is smarter than that.
Well, enough of the public is probably smart enough to distinguish between something that was made with a soul and something that was made without one."

"Well, that's the hope I'd like to cling on to anyway.
All right. I think, fair enough.
Thank you so much for your time, Jörg. Enjoy your talk later today.
Always a pleasure to talk with you."

"Thanks, man. Pleasure."