The Exchanges

Q Can you give me the example of a publisher and a game developer? The distinction?

A Sure. So, uh, for example, I mean, I think Crafton recently, like, just, just to kind of, um, give you a very live example, Crafton worked with a company called ZeptoLab that has a game for, uh, the global market, and they worked with them to make an Indian-specific version of the game. So I don't know what the exact deal terms were, but I assume that they would pay for part or full development cost. They would have a revenue share with them, may potentially give them a, a guarantee of some kind, some initial, you know, payment, and then, and then it would be up to Krafton to actually market and distribute the game. The developer, after they finished developing the game, would, would either, like, in, for a premium game, they'd be done, for a live-operated free-to-play game, they, they would continue to operate the game and then share, share in the success of the game through a revenue share.

AI assessment note: “Crafton worked with a company called ZeptoLab that has a game”

Q Do you think that's the problem? The smart ones are going out of the country?

A That's one of the problems. But I, I think that gaming in India has a double problem. So first, yes, uh, there are a lot of people in India when they get the, an opportunity to, like, seven X, 10 X their salary by going abroad, and they have that opportunity because they've developed a skill set here, then they'll, they'll, they'll jump. I think the other thing is more of a cultural issue that I have discovered over the past few years that I've been here in India, which is that gaming, at least, and you guys please disagree with me, but in my experience, it seems like gaming is not looked upon favorably by a lot of Indian parents. And so, when somebody wants to go into gaming, they really have to want to go into gaming. Um, but otherwise, I think a lot of the parents, they typically would want to go to join, like, some high tech firm in Amazon, a Google, a Facebook, a company like that, rather than join a gaming company. And so the image of a gaming company, unlike in the West, right? Like, in the West, joining a game company is looked upon very favorably for a number of reasons, right? It's, um, generally, Like leads in terms of innovation. A lot of the people that go, that are in gaming actually are highly coveted by Facebook, Google, and the high tech companies, but that kind of feeling and that kind of, that, that kind of, um, orientation towards gaming in the US versus Ind…

AI assessment note: “That's one of the problems. But I, I think that gaming in India has a double problem.”

Q Can you give me, like, a low-hanging fruit that you think is an opportunity today?

A Well, I mean, I can give you specific examples of what people are doing right now, right? So the, the big thing right now, there's two companies, uh, Inworld and Convey that have been funded for conversational AI. Meaning, right now, NPCs in games, the non-player characters, so like, in, like, an MMO, you can go to a shop, and then there's a shopkeeper that talks to you. Well, the dialogue that happens often with, whether it's an in-story character or with a shopkeeper that has a very limited amount of dialogue is through, like, a dialogue tree, and so you can use these behavior trees to, like, code what is said and not said, or you could use a large language model and give the background behind a character in the large language model Understanding the context of the game and that character that they're supposed to personify can then just naturally respond to people in real time. So that's like one application. There's other applications where there's, there's a company that's trying to automate the art process, right? So like, um, where you, uh, like, think of, uh, think of a character or a building, you create the model for it, you put it in the game, and things like that. There are some companies that are just Trying to make it so that you do sketches, and then it just automatically goes into the game and completes the whole workflow, right? So there's a lot of different are…

AI assessment note: “there's two companies, uh, Inworld and Convey that have been funded for conversational AI”

Q Can you tell me a way, uh, assume I'm a young, twenty-year-old Indian boy-girl, and I want to get a job at Leela Games, your company, what should I learn?

A Well, I, I think it would, it would depend on the specific role that you're looking for. So if it's product management, I would be looking for one thing. If it's engineering, it'd be completely different. But I would say like a general bit of advice for anyone that's new looking to join a gaming company is to essentially think outside of the resume and to build, I call it a digital footprint, but basically like show me what you know, show me what you can do. That's just not, like, lines on your resume. So whether it's projects, or whether it's, like, blog posts where I can see how you think, because I will say, you know, having been recruiting here for the last three and a half years, and having interviewed and, you know, looked at thousands and thousands of resumes, I would say that most people generally don't stand out because they don't actually Show me anything that they've done that, that really tells me that they care about gaming, that they've thought about gaming. So anyone that has a blog post, a project that they've put onto a website, any kind of additional kind of digital footprint outside of their resume, Really shows me that this is somebody that I need to pay attention to. So I'll absolutely look at a resume with, like, links to projects, blog posts, YouTube videos, anything of that nature, more than just another resume, right?

AI assessment note: “build, I call it a digital footprint, but basically like show me what you know”

Q Do you feel like the world is becoming a more fragmented place taking inspiration from China? Uh, a country which does not allow foreign apps and replicates it with their own versions. Will all IP that touches the citizens of a certain country in the future be built in the country, or at least be owned or hosted in that country?

A It's a really interesting question because I, I think that that was the direction we were going, and we may go back to that again. It was being called splinternet, basically, like the idea that because China has its own internal policies where, you know, you need a license, you also need a local partner, They were banning a lot of apps from the US. There was the, the current situation now, and there was a time when, when Trump was president of the US and he was going to ban TikTok, it seemed like we were going to be moving more in that direction. We might again, but I do think that that's a danger. And actually though, when it came to me starting a company here in India, um, that was a consideration because we felt that if the world does move towards a splinter net, And if China and Russia are on one side, I want to be on the other side. And if, if India is, uh, split from China, uh, currently one, one thing that's not well understood is that almost all of the top mobile shooter games are all developed by Chinese companies effectively, right? And so like, um, why is that? It's because they have developed deep expertise in shooters, and they also, there's been, like, a phenomenon in which, like, the Tencent teams and the Chinese teams Have, they're just, the, the work ethic, the culture, they're just kind of crazy compared to the West, right? Like the West right now, if I'm just…

AI assessment note: “I think that that was the direction we were going, and we may go back”

Q Um, and… But if the games are going to compete in the same market, one could argue that you could pay them the same amount of money?

A Once we're profitable, sure. And I think that, um, in some industries, like to some degree, that's starting to happen. So we've seen a pretty fast acceleration in the compensation of engineers over the past four or five years as the world became more remote. Certainly after COVID, I think engineers got paid dramatically more, right? So we're starting to see some of that impact as well. But, you know, one thing I would want young people to think about Really try to start with, what do you, what do you want from your life? I think that's a question that not enough young people have asked themselves. And I think that some people have bought into, like, these notions of You know, the, the popularized notions of quiet quitting, side hustle, things like that. And I just think that if more people really thought critically about what, what they're really searching for their life, that they'd be able to make better decisions about the path that they would choose. And there's, there's an exercise actually, I believe it was Clayton Christensen who wrote about an exercise that he recommended for people, which is to think about Your life when you're on your deathbed, and thinking back, and what would make you proud, right? Like, how would you measure the value of your life looking back? I think not enough young people do that, and I, I think that that's something that as an older guy who di…

AI assessment note: “Once we're profitable, sure. And I think that, um, in some industries”