Hot Take Time
GB: More and more players are being introduced to games via streamers. Do you worry that streamers playing through your games will eventually affect sales?
RL: “I’ll be a little more controversial – it will totally affect your sales, 100%. The question is, are your sales ten times higher because streamers are playing your game. If you’re lucky enough that streamers are going to stream your game, it probably means that your game is allowing for player creativity because the streamer gets to show their personality.
“I see streamers like DJs. If I wrote a big hit song, and DJs around the world are remixing that song at dance clubs, that’s only good for you. Even if you’re not making revenue from that dance club, it’s only growing the fact that with the next song you make, people might buy your album.”
GB: Another controversial point in your talk was that you think games developers should really assess whether games are the right medium to tell a story. Could you explain what you mean by this?
RL: “I think Netflix is blurring that barrier, especially if you look at how TV is produced now. Take the Mandalorian, for example – it’s done with LED light walls using game engines as the background. I think game directors might migrate between the two mediums because you have to invert the way you’re thinking about creating that story.
“Before, you shot on a green screen on set and then you’d add in VFX in post production. Now you’re doing all of your VFX and setup your backgrounds before, running it live, and then having your actors interact with an environment. That is more like what games do – we invent this world and then you go and interact with it.
“So yes, I do think that there are a lot of narrative games these days that might do better and find a larger audience if it was a TV show.”
New Tech Means Exciting Times Ahead
GB: Are there any games out there right now that are seriously impressing you from a technology point of view?
RL: “Honestly, I think every game is kind of impressive. I still think Zelda is one of the most amazing games that runs on a handheld device. I am stunned by the technology in that game. How did they fit that onto that chip? It’s crazy!
“Red Dead 2 shouldn’t have been a game. Like, there’s so much content in that game, and I’ve been making games for a long time – how the hell did they make that work? Even with throwing money at it, I don’t know how that works. The human ingenuity to ship that game is incredible.
“I think Unreal Engine 5 is a game changer. I think there is a piece of technology specifically that they’re calling Nanite that completely changes the way the art departments of the world are going to make games. We’ve never had [this situation], “by the way, you’ve been making art for 15 years, here’s a new way of making art”.
Is changing the way of working going down well with developers?
RL: “We’re dabbling on this. Every artist that’s playing with it loves it. You’ll find that every developer you meet, none of us are really experts. We’re all beginners all of the time because we’re constantly learning new things. When you’re given an opportunity to have a tool that can finally make the thing that’s in your head closer to the thing in real life, it’s just f*cking cool.”
“We’re seeing some demos like The Matrix where everyone is like “that’s ridiculous, is that possible?”. And then you download it and you’re like “that’s actually in an editor, that’s working!”. That feels like a structural change.
“I bet you that we’re going to see in the next three to four years the emergence of better internet access worldwide. That means better server and cloud setups mixed with technology that’s going to allow art to be stunning and almost indistinguishable from film. And that’s going to blur the reality between the pre-recorded and the imagined.”
What’s next?
GB: That brings me on to my last question – where do you see games in the next five years?
RL: “I think the games industry is so big that it won’t be one thing. There are companies like Naughty Dog, Sony Santa Monica and Insomniac where the stuff that they’re making is just amazing. I think quality will always win out.
“I think there is going to be a giant growth in interactivity, but a lot of people get it wrong. Games are going to become too big to interact with, which is great if you’re 15 and you have a lot of free time. It’s a great time to be a young gamer.
“There is one generation of gamers that has never existed that we’re going to start seeing in the next ten years, and that’s retirees. I think when I’m retiring I’m still going to play games as a key piece of my entertainment. That means I’ll have disposable income – hopefully, if I make good games [laughs] – and a lot of time.
“I bet that input devices will start catering to more accessibility and a wider audience. I think there’s space in the games industry for everyone. It just can’t make a game for everybody, and that’s the trick.”
We would like to thank Roland Lesterlin and People Can Fly for taking the time to speak with us at Digital Dragons 2022.
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Featured Image Credit: People Can Fly