Interview with Alan Wilson, VP of Tripwire Interactive (Part II)

Here’s Part II of my interview with Alan Wilson, VP of Tripwire Interactive. If you missed Part I, you can find it here.

I had the pleasure of visiting the offices of Tripwire on December 5th, 2013, the very day they launched Killing Floor’s Twisted Christmas event. Needless to say, it was an awesome experience. So sit back, read on, and pay attention to details on how to win yourself a copy of Killing Floor or Rising Storm, courtesy of the fine folks at Tripwire Interactive!

Tyrus: It’s awesome to hear a developer echo my own sentiments. You nailed it on the head in that SDKs and mods increase the longevity and interest in a title. The Triple-A market is getting increasingly competitive and we’re seeing some of these titles get annual releases. Seeing this, I’m saying to myself, “There has to be another way.”

As a fan, I feel like I’m being nickled-and-dimed. I’ve said it time and time again, but when you get a new map or piece of free content, it really means a lot, because I know you guys don’t have to do that.

Alan: Well, when you’re looking at the big names. For example, Counterstrike and Call of Duty… What you’re seeing are two different attitudes. You can understand Activision. They’re tied into a business mold which is rolling like some kind of death machine. They will have big release every year, they’ll pile huge amounts into development. And what did the last Call of Duty sell? A million off the bat?

Mike: Each one is exponentially more than the last one… it’s ridiculous.

Alan: Yeah. You see those kind of numbers and it’s absurd. But, you know, it works. Doesn’t necessarily make them any friends, but it works.

You have to keep in mind as well that you know, all the people on Reddit or forums, or whatever… that’s actually a tiny percentage of people that actually play the damn games. So what did the most recent Call of Duty sell across platforms? Say eight million units? I can’t remember…

Tyrus: I’m not sure. But I imagine that’s close to the mark.

Alan: Either way, there’s say… possibly five million people out there assuming that number is right. Those online, going, “They’re evil! Boycott them!” is probably a few hundred, maybe a few thousand people. It’s a teeny percentage. And the machine will keep rolling. One of these days it won’t. And by then they better find the next huge franchise, otherwise they’re toast.

THQ is an example. It went south because they ran out of big franchises. Basically, the stream dried up and they didn’t have something to replace it.

I think think that’s one of the issues with companies like that. They’re on this enormous treadmill where it’s like, “Something has to succeed big or we’re basically fucked.”

But then there’s the other take on it where Valve and other companies like us roll.

Look what Valve’s done with Counterstrike. The same basic game has been rumbling for years. With an immense amount of content – for free. And it just keeps it fresh, it keeps it rumbling and it keeps it selling and it keeps it generating cash. So there’s a different business model lurking there.

It’s just a different take on it. If I was being fair on the big companies, it would take an enormous mind shift to change business models. They could do it. But I don’t think they have the desire, the will, the drivers forcing them to do it.

I think they’re missing a huge opportunity, they think they’re making huge pile of cash. But hey, I’m not running their company, not my problem! (laughs)

They will go on their way, we’ll go on our way. We’re happy with our way of doing it, and they’re happy with their way of doing it.

Tyrus: Thank you. With the proliferation of Steam Workshop integration and Steam Machines on the horizon. I’m personally excited about easily finding new content and the concept of an open-source console. What kind of impact do you think Steam Machines will have? Do you think there’s some big changes in the gaming world on the horizon?

Alan: It’s so hard to guess. I’m not a gambling man. And that’s a big gamble.

Tyrus: Yeah it is! (laughs)

Alan: I mean, Valve can afford it. I just don’t know. You mentioned Steam Workshop and making content available. You know, with stuff we’re developing now, we’re looking at how we can improve on that. Because you know, with Steam Workshop now, there’s still only a small percentage of people that actually take up on the stuff that is available through the workshop.

So we’re looking at better ways to integrate that into our games where people can go, “Hey look! There’s stuff that you can just get and have it for free!” All you have to do is say “yes!”

(all laugh)

Again, it comes back to that thing where some people are tech savvy. But with a lot of game-players, especially on consoles, you have people who are not tech savvy. They’re not comfortable tooling around.

In the good ole’ mod days you had to download a file and fuck around with .inis and “Alright, I gotta replace this .config file with that .config file and put this gibberish in.” There’s a lot of people, when you stop and think about it, that are not going to do that kind of stuff. Hardcore gamers? Yeah. But the rest of the world? They’re not that comfortable with that kind of stuff.

So anything we can do to simplify that and go, “Look, here are the new maps that the community produced… Do you like that one? Well, check this box and the game will sort all that out for you.”

Anything you can do to make that stuff easier has got to be a good thing.

Now the Steam Machines… as a box sitting in your living room, hooked to Steam, open.

Well, we’ve quietly backed a few things over the years. The first one was OnLive. Don’t know if you remember that service.

Tyrus: I do.

Alan: Still exists!

We first saw it, three or four years ago. And dunno if you remember it, but the idea was you have this little set-top box, about the size of my phone here, and that will access their back-end and stick it onto your t.v. and play with controllers. But you’ll be playing PC games on their backend. The principle being that they’ll work on the specs for games, so you can play the latest CryEngine game, full spec! Which only about four PCs in the world probably can do.

(all laugh)

But it’s on your t.v. playing through some little box, and you don’t have to buy some five-thousand dollar rig to play the damn game. And you’re going, “If they can crack latency issues and that sort of stuff… and get the content out there, that could be a game changer.” So we put The Ball on that two or three years ago.

OnLive poured a bunch of money in. And they went into Chapter 11 last year was it? I can’t remember.

Mike: Yeah, about a year and a half ago.

Alan: They resurfaced as OL2 or something, and we still support them. But they didn’t get the traction.

OUYA this year… Here’s another one. It’s $99 and can run games cheap, right out of the box. And any of these, could just break big.

The Steam Machine… you have Valve behind the thing. If anybody knows how to break big, Valve can.

I mean, we’re huge Valve fan boys, let’s not beat around the bush.

(all laugh)

We like them, we drink with them. We like to tool around and try stuff out, and they like to tool around and try stuff out. Just in this case, we might be trying some silly stuff in Killing Floor, they’re just designing and building a home console!

(all laugh)

That’s just kind of a slightly different perspective! But if anyone’s going to break big, they’re the people to do it. They have access to a phenomenal amount of content through Steam. And they’re approaching it from the perspective of PC gamers to a console. So they’re asking things like, “How does our controller have to perform to make old-fashioned PC gamers comfortable?” And they’ve really thought about it.

And we’re also looking at the Amazon and Google boxes, as a potential step-on from OUYA.

Any of these things could break big. And the trick for us, I guess, is we can’t guess which one it’s going to be. So we have to pick which ones we can support. Steam Machines are easy for us to support, for example. The OUYA, we basically had to develop a game from scratch to go on the Android platform. Which was a risk. We got a fun game out of it, but that’s another story.

Ultimately, we have to pick and choose. It’s going to be very interesting seeing the console market in the next two-to-three years. You’ve got Sony and Microsoft doing the traditional “Here’s our next box, there you go, BANG!” Sony particularly going, “Yes, we’re going to bring in all this additional content.” And Microsoft kind of following along or not… I’m not entirely sure where they’re going.

Tyrus: I’m not entirely sure they know either! (laughs)

Alan: And I think that’s a large part of the problem.

You’ve got stuff like OUYA and others with these cheap, micro-consoles coming at it from one end. Then you have Valve coming at it from another end, going “Let’s take all this vast world of Steam content and move it into your home.”

With people coming at it in so many directions, the market is going to be flooded with choice over the next few years. Which ones work out? I don’t know. I really don’t.

I wouldn’t bet against Sony, Microsoft or Valve. Sony and Microsoft have been in it for years. You talk about Nintendo as well, but that’s another story.

But those guys have been doing it for a while. And you have Valve coming at it from a completely new and different direction. With, let’s be honest, a WILDLY enthusiastic client base.

And you’re talking about what, sixty million users? (Update: Alan tells me that Valve announced Steam has 75 million registered users at the Steam Dev Days in January 2014).

With seven million people playing at peak? Those are enormous numbers! At the end of the day, Sony and Microsoft would probably bite their arms off to get those numbers. (laughs)

They’re probably beating around Gabe’s house offering insane amounts of money. But he’s not playing that game. Valve is in a similar position as us I guess, in that they’re control freaks. They’re in control. And why would you give that up? Especially when you’re doing what you love.

So who will win? I don’t know. We’ll back the horses that we think are worth it, that deserve it, that we can. Just don’t know how it will work out.

Tyrus: We’ve been hearing that the triple-A space is becoming more competitive. And people have been saying forever that the “Indie Revolution” is dying down. Do you think the best is yet to come? What do you think the Gaming Industry is going to be like in the next few years?

Alan: Oh yeah… Personal view? You hear all the time “PC gaming is dying, Triple-A development is becoming harder.” I honestly don’t think much of this really has changed that much.

Triple-A gaming… in our view, we’re building Triple-A titles this time around, thank you very much! (laughs)

I think part of the problem is that some of these very big companies are so tied into mega blockbusters. I’ll just draw the parallel with movie studios… One from my era, what was it called?

Ah, Heaven’s Gate!

Dunno if anyone remembers Heaven’s Gate as a movie?

Tyrus: Nope. (laughs)

Alan: (laughs) I wouldn’t expect you to! It was well before your time! I was actually at Oxford when they filmed it. Some of my friends were extras in it, actually, but that’s a different story for another day! Anyhoo, this was a movie that went piles over budget. Insanely over budget. Can you remember how much? (looks to Mike) (Alan’s note: per IMDB, Heaven’s Gate is “Considered one of the most notorious screen disasters in the history of film”).

Mike: You know, I haven’t seen it either, but…

Alan: Well, I don’t think anyone’s ever seen it! (all laugh)

Mike: But I always had heard that the budget was a colossal failure and it was kind of a good reference point on what to avoid.

Alan: Yeah.

And I can see that coming. It feels to me like some of these senior execs in the gaming industry just don’t draw these parallels and go, “Wait a minute… Haven’t we seen these great studios in movies feel like they have to get bigger, and bigger and bigger.” And suddenly, they keep piling more cash in and expecting more cash to pile out. And one of these days they pile a huge amount of cash in, and it doesn’t come back out. And they go, “Oh crap!” And if they’re lucky, they get bought out by somebody. And it they’re unlucky, they shutter the place. And I think it’s come down to the companies themselves and what level they’re competing at. Many of them are like “We’ve got better tech than you do,” it’s not, “We’ve got a better game than you.”

It’s like movies where they say “We spent more on special effects than you have!” Yet it’s still a shit movie! (all laugh)

Tyrus: Right.

Alan: And so you see all this stuff going on.

Is Triple-A any harder? It all comes down to how you want to compete. We can compete on the grounds of what we actually produce. In movie terms, we may be the “cult hit.” Look at Killing Floor. 2.5-something million copies sold. It’s in the top 50 best PC games of all time, in terms of units sold. And that stuff’s just madness.

Is the Indie Revolution dying? No. These things just change. People have said modding went away. But the thing people forget is that mods, indies – all that stuff… the whole point of all that stuff is that it’s new. It’s part of a revolution because it’s new. But then that stuff becomes mainstream.

Take us, for example. We haven’t gone away. We’ve just become mainstream. That’s why people don’t consider us to be indie. We are independent. But we’re not “indie,” because we’re doing fairly mainstream stuff. In fact, we probably always have been.

Those mod teams haven’t gone away. There’s generations of modders out there doing stuff. But it’s different than what it was ten years ago.

And all those indies… there’s still people out there producing mad, weird indie titles. But the whole point of those pieces… It’s kind of the bits that are on the periphery of the industry so people will find new things to do.

You know, some of those new things… take a bloody Farmville or something like that. When it first appeared, people were like, “Wow! That’s so cool!” And Zynga made a bazillion dollars out of it. But it instantly became mainstream. But now that style of game has become commonplace on Facebook and you’re like “Ah, yet another Farmville… Meeeeh…” (all laugh)

And something else has to come along. You have that kind of core of mainstream business. And there’s all that stuff that goes around on the edges as people dream up new stuff. And the whole point of that new stuff is that it changes. The bits that actually succeed become mainstream. So people can go off and think of something else new and think up other weird stuff, what have you.

I won’t even begin to start throwing ideas out there. That can go horribly wrong! (all laugh)

So mod teams, indie developers… they’re all fringe. And the whole point of fringe is driving change. So that has to change every year. That’s the whole point.

Tyrus: So where does Tripwire fit in this space? Where are you going?

Alan: Where Tripwire is going… it takes you time to figure that stuff out. And some people never figure that out for themselves anyway. (laughs)

It’s kind of looking inward at yourself and trying to figure out what you are. We think we are good at developing new IP and developing games. We can do a whole bunch of other things. We can do publishing. We can do multiplayer for other games, and we’ve even been asked to at times. We’ve never done development for other people.

There’s all those things we could do.

But we know what we do best. The core of our new business is about developing new IP, about developing games. Not turning handles. Part of the nature of the guys in here is that if we just turned handles, people will get bored and they will go off the pace. We kind of learned that as we switched people from Killing Floor to Red Orchestra. It refreshes people a bit, as the two games are entirely different games. They play different. And we feel that if you work on the same thing all the time, you get stagnant, you get stale.

And that’s one of the challenges for us that’s come up over the last year or so. How do we keep ourselves doing the stuff that we think we’re best at? Which is developing new games, yet maintaining and supporting our existing titles and keeping that rolling as well. And that’s stuff that we’ll continue to work on and improve in the upcoming years.

We’ll get into a spin of generating more content internally and finding partners to work with who we can really trust, who have the love for the product. Like the crew doing the Rising Storm stuff, because they love that as well. We’ll find the partners that do that really well for us. We’ll continue to work on our own titles as well because that’s our product and we love doing it.

We won’t become three, four, five-hundred people developing multiple titles. We’re unlikely to become a company that has three hundred people working on one title. You lose the individuality in that. And one of the things that we’ve learned is that we work best as a collaborative team where everybody has input if they want to.

Where we will expand is working on our core team.

We want to continue doing our best work in-house, because that’s what we enjoy doing and it will get the best possible focus. So it’s about growing steadily. We don’t want to hire a bunch of people before a project, then let half the team go after the project. We want to keep our people. We’re fortunate in that our turnover is ludicrously low. And long may it stay that way.

But I think it’s because we built that core team that develops games. that comes up with ideas, that executes on those ideas and can do that core development. That’s where we’ll grow ourselves.

In five to ten years, we may have enough piles of cash in the bank that we can run off and do our own pet projects. We’ll see.

In an ideal world, we’ll continue to be doing what we love. And that’s making games and coming up with new ideas.

Beyond that, I don’t know. I imagine we’ll continue mentoring teams. We may do some odd bits of publishing here or there. I imagine we’ll be on more platforms, it seems kind of inevitable in this day and age.

Where and how do you expand? That just depends on whether or not Sony and Microsoft make it easier and whether Unreal Engine makes it easier to port platform to platform. It goes back to the point I was making earlier where you can start worrying more about making games rather than the technical end about trying to get the bastard to work on a platform. You should spend two weeks getting it to work on a platform, then a year trying to make your game really cool on that platform.

Tyrus: Awesome. Thank you.

So last question. Earlier we touched on how you and some of the other founding members of Tripwire had to deal with changes in responsibilities…

Alan: Yeah. I had hair once! (all laugh)

I have photos to prove it! (all laugh)

Tyrus: So one thing I was curious about is this – Do you and John still get your “hands dirty?”

Alan: Hell yeah! (laughs)

Oh God yeah. It comes down to what has to be done and what you love doing. John, he’s a coder at heart. He’s on the books, about fifty percent of his time as a coder. He used to be lead coder. But now he works under the lead coder. I do, apart from the stuff I enjoy – research, writing, game design… I do well, marketing and PR; hopefully less now. (laughs)

Though let’s be honest, all that stuff’s fun.. As we get bigger, there’s going to be a shit-ton more of that. But I also do finance and all of that, so I get all the localizations to do… yay! (laughs)

For me and John, it’s not in our nature to sit in our offices and instruct. Yes it is a business and we want to make money. But we do this because we love doing it.

Hands-off is not our style. Anyone joining the business… it’s going to be hands-on, because we all just do. It’s a collaborative business and how we like working. It does have its downsides as sometimes we have too many people wanting to help, and you’re like, “I’ve got this, go over there and do that, now fuck off!” (all laugh)

We’re not at that Valve level yet where anyone can come in whenever and do whatever they like. That’s a year or two and a few tens of millions away. (laughs)

But we do get our hands dirty. John’s in the back right now doing some coding and this morning I was doing website updates.

The work has to be done. In any business, enterprise, team, whatever, there’s some shitty stuff that needs to get done. And if everybody understand that anybody is willing to do it, then it’s not that big a problem.

I know I work with people who are willing to do whatever it takes. We’ve been through it as a mod team and as a small company, and as a company struggling and growing. We’ve been through all of that, those “Oh dear God” moments. And because everyone is willing to do those crappy jobs along with those good jobs, it tends to make life easier.

In the end, it’s just a style thing. It doesn’t make us better people, it’s just how we like to do it.

Tyrus: Awesome. Thank you so much for your time!

Alan: No problem. As you’ve discovered, I like to talk! (all laugh)

And that concludes my interview with Alan Wilson. Check out our Facebook page where I’ll be giving away a copy of Rising Storm and Killing Floor this week, courtesy of the fine folks at Tripwire! You have to like the page to be eligible!

And for those wondering what the coveted halls of Tripwire look like, here’s the view from within! Alan provided some additional toys for me to play with!