Ryan Millsap, Chairman & CEO of Atlanta-based Blackhall Studios, is one of today’s top entertainment executives! With a vision for Blackhall that’s ambitious, energizing and boundless, Millsap is blazing a trail through the heart of the South – and setting his sights on the future of entertainment. Listen and learn as Ryan Millsap journeys through the myriad industries, people and landscapes that traverse the complex and dynamic world of film production.
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Ryan: Well, today we are fortunate to have Andrew Greenberg here. He's the executive director of the Georgia Game Developers Association, and a friend of mine for years now. We're involved in things both inside of DeKalb County here in Georgia and outside of the county – and at the state level, too. So, thanks for being here.
Andrew: Great to be here. Thanks for having me out here, Ryan. I've been really enjoying the developments in our county. I chaired the DeKalb Entertainment Commission and serve on the board of our Economic Development Authority. And having a project like Blackhall in the county has meant so much to a lot of people in the area. Not just jobs, not just cash, but this really kind of gem within the county.
Ryan: Well, think about it; four years ago, what was going on in entertainment in DeKalb County?
Andrew: That's right. We had almost nothing. We had about a half dozen productions that did maybe a few shots out there on some locations, and otherwise it was essentially nonexistent. And suddenly there's this incredible, beautiful explosion.
Ryan: Yeah, there's a lot of a lot of cool stuff going on. I love what's going on in gaming.
Andrew: Oh, we've been going nonstop here in Georgia as well with that. And of course, internationally, game development is just huge now. We’re talking a 130-billion-plus industry, and it's amazing. We think of it as, like, Tokyo and California, but there's so much spread around. England's got a great game development community. We see it spreading across the country. Now Georgia is the seventh largest in the in the United States. We've got these incredible e-sports games like Smite and Paladins; we've got some great smaller-level games, these indie studios, these really large Triple-A studios. It's a great mix; there now about 160 studios around the state.
Ryan: So, a lot of people listening to this podcast are from all over the world. And a lot of them don't know a lot about gaming. Will you paint a little bit of a picture geographically? Like, tell me a story about the evolution of gaming from a city standpoint; from a social standpoint. Tell me a story, and paint me a picture – as somebody who maybe doesn't have as much background. I actually know quite a bit about gaming, and I love it, but I know that I have lots of friends. This is a complete mystery to them: this idea of gaming.
Andrew: Well, the amazing thing now is that, 20 years ago, we would have thought that maybe 50% of your listeners were gamers. But now we know it's the overwhelming majority of your listeners. The people listening to me right now play something. They grew up playing something; they love playing something. It’s part of their childhood. It's part of their teen years. It's a part of their college years, and it's maintained at that role. It has become this key entertainment demographic within the industry, and around the world.
So, we see it starting with Pong out in California – out in the Bay Area, long, long ago; Nolan Bushnell and his team getting things going. And it started really concentrated in a few sectors. So, back in 1991, I started going to the Computer Game Development Conference, CGDC, out on the West Coast. I was one of the very few East Coast people coming out to this event. Even then, it was starting to grow. But there was still this view that it was just these few techies out on the West Coast making it happen.
But now we're seeing it spread, and a big part of this was: I was a founding member of a group called the Computer Game Developers Association. CGDA became the IDGA, now the International Game Developers Association. And this is what blows me away. Now we have these robust game development communities – not just in England, not just in Japan, not just in the US, but Turkey's got a big one. Egypt has one. We see them throughout Asia now. I love all these developers. I see stuff coming out of Malaysia now. India's is just growing at a massive rate. South America has become phenomenal. All these people grew up playing, and had all these great ideas for what they wanted to make, and now they can make a living making their dream come true.
Ryan: So, when you say ‘development’ in gaming, you're talking about building new games.
Andrew: Every aspect of it: the art, the music, the coding, the design, the promotion, the community management. There's so many different levels to it now, and it's just great seeing these skills all over the world.
Ryan: What are some of the skills? Are there people that aren't coders who are having success in gaming?
Andrew: Oh, absolutely. One of the great things for the people listening to this who want to get into game development is that we've made the tools so user friendly now. Tools like Unity, Game Maker – even the Unreal Engine, out of the folks in North Carolina. I hate to admit that North Carolina is making great stuff, but they are. We're seeing these great tools that anyone can use.
And the amazing thing is how many people in film are now using these game development tools. It started for pre-visualization. Set the scene, get the camera angles perfect. Get the lighting perfect before you ever made it, before you ever filmed it. And now they're actually starting to do parts of the movies in these game engines.
Ryan: That's incredible. So, what does a game development company look like? What are the layers in that company? How does somebody take the concept of a new game and get it to actual market?
Andrew: Right, right. So, there are these levels of stubbornness. Real stubbornness, and willingness to just keep pounding your head against the wall.
Ryan: Sounds like all entrepreneurship.
Andrew: That's very true. There are some similarities to the film industry. You have the producer. You have to have someone at the top who's got the vision, who’s going to hold the whole project together, make it work. I like to joke that that's the person who puts his feet up on the table and tells everyone else what to do, but it's not.
They are as head-down in it as anyone, and really have to maintain the vision. And just like in film, there's only one person who really holds the vision together for everybody involved in it. You'll have a lead designer; it might be that person. It might be the producer, it might be a director or something like that, but somebody's got to do it. Just like they do in film.
Ryan: Is that guy, like, the business guy? In film, a producer is really like a project manager, right? Once the film has been greenlit and sent to production, the guy who's the line producer, who's in charge of the movie, is really a project manager.
Andrew: Officially, it is the producer. But one of the differences in games is that the producers will be head down on a number of different projects at a time. I mean, you have the joke about the Hollywood producer who's got a dozen things going on, but really it's a dozen things that are still at the lunch table conversation level.
And the one thing that's in production and games is, they're all at some level of production along the whole time. So, sometimes it's the producer, sometimes it's the designer. I've seen projects where it's been an audio person really holding that sort of lead and putting it all together. The audio games – your Rock Bands and Guitar Heroes and others. We did one here called Voice Ball, where it's just amazing. You use your voice to control a ball going back and forth. And so, you have an audio person really in the lead. So it can vary within the industry.
But there are these skills, then, where you have to have someone who really understands design. The user interface: what's the user experience going to be? UX; UI; you have to have people who can do that programing, do the artificial intelligence. I love artificial intelligence design; I hate programing it. I love telling other people what to do – when the bots are supposed to be running around, when they run away, when they take cover, how they fire, when they pick up guns, all that kind of stuff. That's great to define and let someone else do. But you have those coders. You have the artists of all different kinds. Someone has to do the concept art, the beautiful pictures that start the whole vision.
If you're doing a 3D game, someone then builds the model of it. No color or anything; just this body for the robot, for the people, for the dinosaurs, whatever you're doing. In my games, it’s spaceships. You have a texture artist who paints the colors on them, and layers the skin, the uniforms, everything else. Then you have the animator – the rigger, who makes it all move, and hopefully the shoulder or the arm isn't moving out a foot away from the body as it's running across the open field. And then you'll throw it over to a technical artist, perhaps to incorporate it and integrate it into the game itself. You'll have the level designers, who are making sure that there are cool things to do, and that you don't accidentally run through a wall and fall through the earth and break the game along the way. You'll have a test team going through it.
So, there are some phenomenal differences from film and TV, but there are also definite similarities. And my games generally take 12 to 18 months. Some teams can crank them out in six or less and have a great project. Some games take years and years and years, and that's when the frustration can come into it. I'm sure there's no one who's worked on films for years and years and years.
Ryan: Well, it depends on which part of the working you mean. Once it's gotten into actual production, there's usually a timeline, but sometimes it runs over and obviously runs over budget. The long time horizons come sometimes in pre-development, where somebody is like, “Man, I've been working on that movie for ten years.”
Andrew: The whole concepting phase, which can go on forever. Yeah, we have that in the game industry too.
Ryan: So, in the entertainment industry, when you're making a movie that has any decent scale – a 50 to $150 million movie, let's say – you generally need about 300 people on that crew to make that movie, start to finish. Does that translate similarly in gaming?
Andrew: So, Supercell is a pretty well-known game development company in Scandinavia. Billions upon billions in revenue. About 300 people in the entire company – 350, maybe. And they're making billions off of their games. So it can vary dramatically. The hugest games, you will have hundreds and hundreds of people working on them, over years and years and years. But a lot of games are going to be 10 or 12; something like that. A hundred is a good, big-size team making a good Triple-A game.
And the interesting part about what we do then is, you keep the game alive. Not only do you launch it now – I used to just launch them, sell them in Target, GameStop, software, Electronic Boutique – and forget about them after one patch. Now the game stays alive, and you're constantly creating new content for a game that's been out for ten years.
And this is part of the economic development side of games. These evergreen products just keep generating revenue for the company, for the location; they keep generating salaries, keep bringing new people into the industry – and then start rolling out these new teams who go off and make their own games, now that they've got this experience. And we've seen that here in Georgia.
Ryan: You know, when you said that these guys make billions and billions, it made me think: I can't name one gaming billionaire, but you probably can. Who are some of the gaming billionaires that the rest of us don't know about?
Andrew: The funniest part about it is, it's not always the games that do it. They used to be the old joke: “How do you make a small fortune in game development? You start with a large fortune.” I'm sure you've had the same joke for films.
Ryan: They say that about horse racing. They say that about auto racing. I mean, there's a whole bunch of sports.
Andrew: Right. So I talked about the Supercell folks, but the classic example is, there's a game called Counter-Strike, and Half-Life. They became very successful. This company called Valve made great games. And suddenly they created a distribution platform for games called Steam. And the founder of that is a legitimate billionaire. Again, he created good games, but now he's doing it off of that.
Ryan: What's his name?
Andrew: I can't believe I'm forgetting. We got Tim Sweeney, who's over at Epic Games. They've got Fortnite.
Ryan: Okay. And so Tim Sweeney is a gaming billionaire?
Andrew: Right.
Ryan: Although not obviously a household name yet.
Andrew: Right, though his games are: Fortnite. And Epic Games.
Ryan: Well, Fortnite’s obviously a household name.
Andrew: Yeah. And most of these are public companies or have been bought by larger companies. So, we think of this great game, League of Legends, that a company called Riot Games makes out in California. They're now primarily owned by Tencent out of China, which is doing some incredible projects as well. Electronic Arts does Madden. So, here's a game you can see making billions, which is owned by this much larger, publicly traded company.
So a lot of the billionaires; the folks who got in and made these companies – the Nolan Bushnells who founded the entire industry, Lewis Castles over at Westwood, the folks who started Blizzard and the like – got out of there with a lot of money, but they went public before the billions rolled on in. The other, more famous billionaire is the creator of Minecraft, who sold his to Microsoft for a huge amount of money, and then spent a few hundred million of what he brought in outbidding Beyonce for a house.
Ryan: Wow.
Andrew: Just to show he could do it.
Ryan: Well, you’ve gotta know what you want to do with your money. You know, I'll tell you a funny story about Blizzard. Years ago, I had an office in Orange County in California, and we were a growing company. One of the guys in our company had to go take some temporary office space on another floor of the building, because we were running out of space. And he had a cube next to a bunch of guys that were really young. He watched them for months. Basically, it seemed like they were just screwing off every day for hours and hours and hours. And he finally stopped them one day and he said, “God, you guys just screw off all day. What do you do over there?” He said, “Well, we run a gaming company.” He said, “Really? What's it called?” He said, “Blizzard Entertainment.” It was the early, early Blizzard. And those are the guys that I guess sold it out later.
Andrew: And having known Bill Roper and the rest, they were screwing off most of the time.
Ryan: Yeah. That's what he said.
Andrew: The first Warcraft was a great game. They did an excellent job taking some innovative techniques and really refining them nicely.
Ryan: Tell me about some of the best gaming stories going on in Georgia today.
Andrew: The best known is a company called Hi-Rez Studios that has created Smite and Paladins – these giant e-sports games. We’ve been doing e-sports competitions with them under the Georgia Esports League and the Southern Interactive Entertainment Game Expo – since, I guess, 2012 was the first one we put on with them. And it's this great story. This is a company that started with a game called Global Agenda that I helped them on. It didn't do that well, but it kept them going. They did their second game; they got a license called Tribes. They did good things with it, but it wasn't bringing in a huge amount of money. And with games, it's never the first one. It's rarely the first one that makes you all your money. It's when you refine what you're doing and you come out with that third, fourth.
The classic example is Angry Birds. Rovio had done, like, a dozen – I don't know the exact number – about a dozen games. And they were doing alright. But suddenly Angry Birds comes out, and now it's Disney-level. So, it's that classic story. You have to do a few of these, get them going, get your skills going. Persevere. I talked about stubbornness. Perseverance is one of the most important skills. And communication: the two most important skills in game development.
They come out with Smite, and it hits at the right time. It's this great game. You get to play gods battling each other – for bragging rights, essentially. Gods and goddesses. And it does well. And it's continuing to do well, and they continue to create more gods for it. And they're not making them up. They're plumbing them out of real, human history. And people really love that. You've got the Indian mythos brought in; you've got the Norse mythos, and so forth. And this makes for this great combination. People can always find these ancient stories and ancient legends that still speak to us, and they can now put them in a game when people have a lot of fun with them.
So that's been the big, classic example. Tripwire Interactive is another example. That small studio started out as four people, did a game called Red Orchestra – a real fun World War II fighting game, but not a huge success. It let them keep going and make another game. They finally did Killing Floor, this zombie killer, which just explodes – literally and figuratively – and suddenly they're doing great business. And they're almost 100 people here in Georgia, from that original four. Hi-Rez has gone from the original five to almost 500 people now, and they're spinning off companies. This company, Blue Mammoth, came out of them. There's now this e-sports production company, Skillshot, that's doing great things, that came out from within their doors. And it's one of those stories you love to see: a successful company spinning off more successful, innovative, groundbreaking companies.
Ryan: What needs to happen in Georgia to nurture this environment and see it grow?
Andrew: The state has been very forward-thinking in this. We know about the tax credit the state put into effect to bring the film industry here. And it's created such a wonderful creative surge within the state. That same tax rate applied to game development and kept that going. Unfortunately, there are limits to the game development tax credit you don't see on the film one. So that’s stifling growth a little bit. But that tax credit served significantly to build up these companies. They could afford to have a few “eh” games because the tax credit would bring them along until they suddenly had their big hits. And we see the significance of that, both for film and for games now – in post-production and other areas. We're seeing that kind of forward thinking going into e-sports as well.
A big part of it is building up that community of developers. Part of why California and Tokyo had the great reputations they did is that they fostered this community of developers. It just kept going and kept going, and they could support each other after fails. When a company failed, they would hire the people and say, “Get to work on our projects.”
So, we're starting to see that now. That community is here, where if a studio doesn't do well, other studios will grab those people. People can come from elsewhere because they know they can stay in the state and succeed. We're seeing the company starting to nurture the next level of talent out of the university. That's a big part of the talent level. It’s significant. Anyone can get into this industry. You have to stay in it to develop those skills that really make you a great game developer. So having that mentorship, having that opportunity, is a big plus to it. Seeing the state work to expand computer programing, education, and the arts in general. I mean, we need artists as much as we need programmers. We need music and audio engineers as much as we need coders. Seeing all of these areas starting to be nurtured again at the schools is a critical component. And seeing the colleges and groups like the Georgia Film Academy jump on that. It's a tremendous opportunity.
Ryan: What's the Georgia Film Academy doing with gaming?
Andrew: The Georgia Film Academy has looked into how it can work with gaming, like it can in other areas, and the idea of post-production and e-sports production are all aspects that can work well under the Georgia Film Academy model. So, the hope is to have them take their wonderful skillset of bringing nontraditional students into creative industries, and apply it the same way.
Esports production is similar in many ways to film production, in that you need the camera operators, you need the audio folks, but you also need the people who can understand the community and interact with the community during the live stream. And you need folks who understand the games. We have the folks who watch the games and feed the games into the live stream that's going out. We need those sorts of skill sets. Esports is... I've used the word explosive too many times... let's say, rapidly growing.
Ryan: A rapidly growing area.
Andrew: And Georgia's already one of the hubs for that. Some of the biggest events are happening here, and we hope to see more and more of those. We need those core skills. And all of these areas fold right back into what you and I are talking about. What about economic development? Having these great companies – they can stick around and do great things and attract great people to keep working with them. That's exactly what every community needs.
Ryan: Let's say that I could give you a magic wand.
Andrew: Thank you! It's a nice looking one. Y'all can't see it, but it's awesome.
Ryan: It has incredible powers, this magic wand. You can wave it, and the next five years will look like however you imagine for gaming in Georgia. What happens over the next five years?
Andrew: We get the investment community getting even more involved in supporting these great little indie studios that have 1 or 2 successes – help them get past that third or fourth hump, which is when their really successful games start coming out.
Ryan: So, we need more capital.
Andrew: There is definitely the need for more capital. We have more great spaces for them to work out of – more great locations.
Ryan: Okay, hold on. Is anybody brokering that capital today? Are there any good investment bankers? Like, if you're a game developer, and you need money, is there anybody you can call and say, “Hey, could you help me find this money?” And that person actually knows how to go out and harvest the money from the investors.
Andrew: The interesting thing is that groups like Silicon Valley Bank, and others who do that well out in California – we haven't seen them apply that same skillset here. So, no – in the Georgia Game Developers Association, we have an investment conference. We bring out some of the best investors around – the Atlanta Technology Angels, and others – to look at great projects. Our past winners of the investment conference have been going on to great things; they're developing these companies that are getting great levels of investment now.
But the same focus isn't on this that you see on other areas. That's what we're hoping to bring in. Georgia's got this great tech industry now, but folks are very used to the B2B – the business-to-business side of it. They're not used to the business-to-consumer side, because we've got all these great businesses focusing on businesses. We need more businesses and investors who focus on that incredible return you can get from consumers.
Ryan: Well, if there are any young entrepreneurs out there searching for ideas and places where there is new opportunity, clearly there's an opportunity for somebody to step in and be a capital allocator; a capital resource. Somebody who can gather capital investors together and start to funnel them to the best gaming developers and become that little mini investment bank.
Andrew: That's absolutely right. And we've seen great returns for folks who have done this in the past. I mentioned Riot. A lot of the former Blizzard folks went there, and they got some investors to help them out. And then that sold for a tremendous amount of money. Supercell is one of those other great stories of how to succeed. They had some government support, as well as the private side. So yeah, there's a lot of ways to get a piece of that 130- to 150-billion-dollar industry.
Ryan: So, the next thing you said was that they need more space. Now, that's my expertise. Tell me what kind of space they need. Maybe I can build it.
Andrew: I want to see more of those locations that bring all the creative industries together, because they are merging together with the skills and the technology that we use. I talked before about how Unity and Unreal were used for pre-vis, and now are being used for the actual game implementation. We're seeing more of the post-production tools being used. The audio post-production is almost exactly the same skillset, though there are different philosophies on how you implement it.
Ryan: Wait, so do you think I should be building some sort of gaming campus that's attached to the second phase of Blackhall Studios in Atlanta?
Andrew: Oh, absolutely. And live streaming is a part of that. I mean, we already know that streaming is the medium of the 21st century. There's no denying that. Live streaming is the next key component, and it's already huge with Twitch and YouTube and Mixer and Facebook Live. But we're seeing the demand for that continue to grow almost exponentially. More and more people are both live streaming, creating content, and absorbing that content. And I think it's just gonna be a natural fit for any studio space to start working on pushing out that sort of content as well.
Ryan: Do you think you know what that space would look like? Because I'm going to need some help figuring out how to design it.
Andrew: I think there's some great examples now, but it can be done even better. Because a lot of the fun of live streaming… I mean, for the fun of podcasting, you're bringing really cool people together to do something really interesting – not the usual mix of skills and speakers you would expect – and letting very cool things come out of it. And, right now, the most popular area for live streaming is game viewing. I mean, these massive streams are seen by millions of people, pretty much concurrently. We'd need to create facilities where they can do that in innovative ways. You've got various recording areas, you've got green screen areas, and so on – but they'd be really focused on pulling in that community at the same time, so that the folks who are basically creating the content are also getting content from that live stream. Someone, or they themselves, is seeing what the chat’s doing, and they are able to respond almost immediately to what their viewers want to see. This is really my vision of interactive entertainment: having that audience at the same time, letting them know what they want to see.
Ryan: Okay, so you need more money. The industry needs more money. The industry needs better space. Anything else that magic wand needs to wave and make?
Andrew: They'll still need to be training the people. We still need all these training programs to get the great folks out there. We’re afraid of the shortfalls in talent here in Georgia, because there's such demand right now. We keep needing to bring them in and get them the mentors.
Ryan: I love it. Well, Andrew, thank you for being here today. Do you have social media or anything that people can reach you by?
Andrew: I do. People can follow the Georgia Game Developers Association on Twitter at GGDA _ORG. I'm HDIAndrew – my company that I even go bragging about is Holistic Design Incorporated. But you can find me on Twitter, and of course, you can find the Georgia Game Developers Association on Facebook. Very active communities there.
Ryan: Well, thank you for being here today. This has been enlightening and fun for me.
Andrew: Yeah, always a great time, Ryan.
Ryan: Thanks, Andrew.
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Thanks for listening to the Blackhall Studios podcast with Ryan Millsap. We want to hear from you! Find us on SoundCloud, iTunes or Spotify, and follow us on Instagram at @BlackhallStudios and at @Ryan.Millsap.
