The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 15 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Lee: Traditional mirror-room focus group game testing produces useless feedback
“Traditionally, the way that game testing works is you hire a group. They do these blind tests. Everyone sits in a room. There's the one-way mirror. You watch people play the games. It's horrible. And I looked at that trying to figure out like, why are these te…”
McGinnis: Pad deadlines and lie about dates when managing creatives
“What I've learned is pad your deadlines lie to them, and outlining the cost of what it's going to be if we don't execute by this date.”
Elan Lee: AI compresses game ideation from months to hours
“And it used to take, you know, months or years. And with AI, I've actually been able to shorten that to sometimes just a few hours.”
Lee: Exploding Kittens designs games that make the players entertaining
“We don't make entertaining games. We make games that make the people you're playing with entertaining.”
Lee: Exploding Kittens only ships games that get 100% 'play again' ratings
“When you finished playing our games, there's one question on the whole survey, which is, do you want to play again? That's it. That's all I care about. When a game hits a hundred percent yes, we're gonna ship that game.”
Exploding Kittens hit Kickstarter goal in seven minutes, $3M in three days
“We hit that goal in seven minutes. By the first day, we had raised a million dollars. By the end of the second day, we had two million, and by the end of the third day, we had three million, and this thing was completely out of control.”
Elan Lee: AI suggestions advance brainstorming from square zero to four
“Then to figure out the theme, I take those instructions that I've spent weeks working with an AI to generate, and I feed them right back into the AI and say, become an expert at this game and tell me what it should be called to attract this target audience. An…”
Lee: Exploding Kittens fulfilled every single Kickstarter backer order on time
“For six months, that's what we had to do to get those things out the door. And we were on time with every single one of those orders.”
McGinnis: Exploding Kittens shipments suffered cargo fires and lost shipping containers
“We had a cargo ship just lose containers into the ocean. We had a cargo ship catch on fire.”
Lee: Exploding Kittens sold 700,000 copies in 30 days
“700,000 copies of the game sold in 30 days, and that is truly just unprecedented in the industry.”
Inman: Exploding Kittens turned crowdfunding from transactional into participatory
“I think what it really did was it turned something, an experience that was transactional, buying and receiving a good into something fun that you're involved with. Rather than, give me 20 bucks and I'll send you a card game in a couple months. Instead it was, …”
Lee: Exploding Kittens used creative challenges instead of monetary stretch goals
“Our stretch goals were not based on currency. We said, show us funny stuff. One of the characters in our game is called Taco Cat. We said, show us 20 pictures of a real Taco Cat, and we will add 10 cards to the game.”
Elan Lee: Game creation breaks down into product, theme, and sales
“So I think game creation from my perspective is really just three phases. You have to create a fun game. You have to come up with a good theme for that game, and then you have to sell the game. And those three phases, I think are really relevant to whatever yo…”
Lee: Exploding Kittens launched without any fulfillment plan as Kickstarter surged
“I'm watching that thing go from 20,000 to 50,000 to a 100,000, and I am losing my mind because every one of those backers, I've got to figure out how to get a game to their front door, and I had no idea how, literally no idea how.”