The story behind a decade of success

NOTE: This interview was originally published in video form at Back Log Banter. It has been edited for length and clarity.

Tucker Hazell: I want to know a little bit about your history in the games industry. As the CEO of the company, what did you do before you ended up at Hipster Whale?

Clara Reeves, Hipster Whale CEO: I at no point thought that I wanted to be a games CEO, I just wanted to make games. When I was starting out I was probably thinking I was going to make an animation, maybe more like film, and I studied fine art and learned how to draw and animate. I was playing a lot of video games, and at some point someone who I was playing video games with was like, “You should do this!” And I just went, like, “Yeah, people make these things. That’s right. This is possible!” 

Since that point, that just became my focus. At that point I’d never met anyone who made video games. I lived in Australia, it wasn’t exactly what you think of as the hub of where all the video games are being made at that point.There definitely were studios here, I just didn’t know about them. So I went and taught myself how to program. So I got a computer science degree and said, “I’m going to make games!” And I sort of thought that I’d be more hands-on to be honest. I thought I’d be like a technical artist or something with my art and my programming.

I started in QA because that was like the entry level job that people did and the first game that I worked on was Test Drive Unlimited for PSP and Xbox 360 and PS2, I think. So just playing thousands of hours of that game, and watching it evolve and learning how it changed and how the development team we’re making changes, making it better, how information sort of moved between teams and how it eventually got released, marketed, taken to audience and seeing it on the shelf and going, “Oh my gosh, I made that.” Yeah. 

And from that, I pretty much was straight away put into production. I didn’t even know what a producer was. I had to actually ask when I was offered the job, like “What does that mean?”

TH: Okay! Well, that’s a good start. 

CR: There was just recognition from the team that I was able to organize people towards a mission. And so that became my role, even though it wasn’t a deliberate move. Through my career I’ve led projects where I’m… maybe it’d be called a director… I’m taking over what this project is going to be and making sure that people understand its design direction. Making sure it stays on track. Then I’ve done people leadership, making sure that the people in the team are looked after, have what they need, and are communicating well. I see those things as quite different.

Some people can do both, but I really do see looking after people and looking after a product as two distinct roles. That’s where I’m most useful in the process. I love games. I love the design of games, and everything that goes into considering all the small bits and pieces that the players don’t even understand. I think particularly in the kinds of games that we make, in arcade games, it’s usually those things that make the game, where it’s invisible. You don’t realize that why you’re having so much fun is because we spent so long on just how you turn that corner, and the way that it feels. A lot of my job is unblocking other people to be able to do their roles really well, and also being in my role as CEO now, looking out for icebergs. Like I’m in front of the ship going, “Oh, we should be doing this!” or, “Here’s something we should be looking out for.” You’ve got a whole bunch of people who are all massively motivated, they want to do the best job and are so passionate. How do we keep that going, and keep them feeling like they’re able to do all the things that they want to do in the role that they have? That they’re working well with each other, and that we’re making good teams that can really just run at the problems and so that they’re working on the game and able to focus. 

It’s hard enough just to make the game sing and to do all the things that you need to do to really pull it together. It’s a really uphill battle. If you can remove the intrapersonal nonsense there, if you can just make it, like, we know how to work as a team. We respect each other. I’m not worried about “Do these people like me?” Or “Am I in trouble?” If you can remove as much of that as possible, you just focus on, “we’re making a game, we’re going to be great.” That is magic to me. That’s ideal.

TH: It’s exciting that you have hands-on experience from the smallest side of the game development process, which is QA. That was your entry point. Now you’re leading the teams, you’re choosing the projects, you’re doing the highest level of business communication… but I do want to start even before that, with you talking about some of the games that might’ve inspired you to be a designer yourself when you were younger and you were trying to get into the industry. What were the games that you were playing?

CR: Gosh, I love games so broadly. But the ones at that point in time that were really grabbing me were the games that Sony was doing at that time, like PaRappa the Rapper and Katamari. I was never really connected with Halo or any of that sort of culture, but these really arty games that were really at the front end of where pop culture is. That was really super enjoyable to see in games that I loved, pop culture and games coming together. I was seeing street culture and fashion, and everything that I loved there, combined with the game mechanics that I loved, that just sang to me. I think it was actually PaRappa the Rapper I was playing when that person went, “You should make these!”

TH: Let’s talk about you coming to Crossy Road specifically. As frankly, the game that has defined your life and your career.

CR: Oh my gosh, yeah.

TH: Tell me about the first time you found the game and what you thought that first time. In a very saturated mobile game market, what made that game stand out to you as something that you pursued further to be involved with?

CR: I saw it before it launched. I knew the developers of the game, Matt [Hall] and Andy [Sum], and I was working in a role at the time where I was doing investment management for the government. I was investing in the games industry, and I had seen Crossy Road in development. Then I was chatting to Matt about something else. And I remember just going, “What’s happening with that game? Where is that?” And he said, “yeah, people like that one.” You sometimes see projects where you just go, “That’s bubbling up to top of mind again. Show me that again. Keep me updated.” My first time seeing it, it wasn’t a thing yet. 

TH: You weren’t jumping on the bandwagon. You were in before it was cool.

CR: Yeah, exactly (laughs). Could I have predicted that it was going to do what it did? No. I probably would have jumped on the bandwagon earlier (laughs). The next time I saw it was after it had launched, probably a few months later, and it was everywhere. It was a big hit. It was at the very top of the stores. Seeing that for people that you know, for a game that you’ve seen in its pre-release evolution, is really exciting. I think at the time I probably didn’t quite appreciate the scale of it even.

TH: What do you mean by “the scale” of Crossy Road?

CR: I was seeing it be really successful, like, “Oh my gosh, it’s on a billboard. Wow!” I don’t think that the actual reach of the game was clear to me at that time. Hundreds of millions of players and how much it would become a family brand. You can say to an eight year old, ‘have you played Crossy Road?’ And they’d be like. “Yeah, I know what you’re talking about!” That’s a rare and special thing.

TH: Definitely. What has allowed it to exist for 10 years — still available on the App Store, still getting updates, still being the main thing that is funding your team, your company, your career — is that you have microtransactions, updates, skins that are released. What goes into making a content roadmap for a free to play game like Crossy Road that mostly focuses on cosmetics and skins?

CR: Because we’ve got a 10 year old game, we’ve got a real mix of players. We’ve got people who are coming in the door for the first time and they’ve got so much content. Then we’ve got people who’ve been with us for 10 years who are eagerly awaiting every new thing that we pop in the game. We’ve got all kinds of different ways we think about how we’re releasing content and who it’s for. At the end of the day, I think what we’re trying to do is to entertain people. What our audience really wants is to have a good laugh and find the secrets we put in, and see that we see them. 

Often in the content that we make, we’re actually just trying to make each other laugh. We make a lot of characters and worlds, and then we throw most of them out. They didn’t quite make it. When I can see the team laughing and showing each other and they are going, ‘Oh, come around this screen and look at that!’ And then we’re like, “Cool. This one will be popular and people will like it!” Crossy Road is a simple game, a light touch piece of entertainment. I’m always just hopeful that when people do have that interaction with Crossy Road that they get that laugh. They go, “That was a good use of my time. My day is better because of that!”That’s always what we’re going for. That’s the promise of the brand that we have to keep delivering on.

TH: There are a lot of skins, a lot of hidden characters and fun things that you can find in the game that have been added and added over the course of so many years. Do you have any that jump to mind as particularly funny ones that was something the team had a good time coming up with?

CR: We had one recently that was called Long Chicken. It was actually a developer joke. One of our artists just stretched the neck of the chicken really long. We had that developer laugh where we all went, “That’s really funny!” Then it made it into the game because we were like, “Everyone should see this!”

TH: A lot of the skins in the game are collaborations with other creators, IP, and other pop culture brands. What goes into getting the rights for someone else’s character, putting it in the game, and making sure you’re doing it justice?

CR: We love them and our audience really loves them, if we get the brand collaboration right. It’s a win for everyone. On the practical side of it, there has to be a connection made between the brands. Sometimes it’s just that we know that developer, we think this is going to be a good fit between our audiences, and we think we can do something really fun together. That’s often how it starts. But sometimes it’s more formal, or it’s a big brand that you don’t actually have a connection with, so there’s a business outreach. How we make a decision about whether it’s a good fit…  Is our team excited to work on it? Is this something our audience really wants? Is this a brand that they also will go like, “Oh, I love that!”

Our style is so abstract, sometimes there are brands that we’d like to do a collaboration with, but we don’t know that it will look right. If everything you do is a circle, we can’t have circles in our game… if you need spheres, I’m so sorry! So there are some things that maybe are not a fit with our brand and we just have to say, “No, it’s not going to work.” It’s also really fun for the dev team, because they often also love the game that we’re doing in collaboration with. It’s exciting to meet other developers. It’s exciting to work with a new brand that you know, and release it to the audience we have.

TH: Are there any brands or pop culture things that you were a big fan of that you pushed to get in the game?

CR: Yeah, Katamari (laughs)! We were working with Bandai [Namco] on Pac-Man 256, so we already had that connection. I was like,” Ooh, can I please?” That was really, really fun.

TH: Each of these crossovers is a chance to market the game to a new audience that is a fan of that brand, and then your game becomes that’s entering their sphere. With the game existing for so long, and having so many different collaborations, do you find that the game markets itself, or do you still find it a challenge to continually make sure you’re marketing it?

CR: Um… both, is the answer. It is one of the evergreen mobile arcade titles. So we have that, and we have to make the most of it. Even when we are advertising, we’re talking to people who already know about it. We’re aiming to say: “Come back and play, because we’ve got something new for you!” We make the most out of the organic marketing that we can get. That’s incredibly valuable, because advertising is so expensive. But it has to be paired with marketing, making sure that we’re really talking to the people who are engaging with us, and that it’s really fun for them. I’d say for everyone in games, mobile or not, working out how to make that make sense over the past few years has been an ongoing challenge.  

TH: Your game has survived a lot of ups and downs and changes in the mobile market. How do you think the mobile game market has changed in ten years since this game launched? Are there any major trends that you’ve noticed that you’ve had to adapt to with the team?

CR: I think it’s the double-edged sword of our industry. I love that it’s always changing, it’s never boring. But man, it’s tiring (laughs). It’s just relentless. What worked yesterday won’t work tomorrow. Part of my role as CEO is to instill that in the team. What we were doing yesterday is not what we should necessarily do tomorrow. What we’re trying to do is make the best entertainment and make it where people are and how they want to play. We have to keep moving. Spending a long time in this industry, you get a better sense of that. You see platforms change. You see trends come and go. All of these things are opportunities. They are opportunities for new things to come, they are opportunities for old things to go (laughs). 

You have to find where you’re going to fit in all of that. And when some opportunities are shrinking, you’ve got to look for where they’re growing. Now, I think we’re seeing that there’s just so much content, so many platforms. To make a game and release it directly to an audience is easier than ever… but to actually get a hold of an audience and to get some space for people to find you is harder than ever. The differences between platforms are really becoming fuzzy. Mobile and console used to be very different. Now we’ve got lots of crossover! So the options are wildly more complicated. Fundamentally we’re still trying to entertain people.

TH: One thing that I’ve noticed is a lot of mobile game advertising for games that don’t look particularly high quality. I think that has hurt the reputation of the mobile game industry. These game ads that people say look fake, or they sometimes literally are fake. They’re just there for people to tap, then you go to a store and it’s just something completely different. How have those fake mobile game ads impacted your team? Has it changed the way that you have had to approach marketing? Has it soured any people’s experience with the mobile game industry?

CR: Yes, it’s something that the whole industry has to deal with. How do you communicate quality? We’re in this for the long term. We’re not thinking, ‘can I get you into this thing right now and then get you out?’ We want you for 10 years. We want you to love our brand. We want you to come back, we want you to play our next game. So when we’re making decisions about how we talk to our audience and how we advertise, those are not appropriate for us because we want you to think about us in a positive light for a long time. But when you’re up against what is essentially clickbait, it makes it really, really hard. This is an advertising problem, not just a games problem.

TH: At a certain point, all you can do is make sure your team is putting out trustworthy ads, delivering on their project and making your customer base happy. You exist in a market that has a lot of other people other than yourself, it’s just something you gotta fight. How do you see the mobile space as a bigger part of the game’s ecosystem?  What’s the connection like between the different spheres of the games industry?

CR: We also have released console games! When you design for a platform, you’re thinking about how the audience interacts with that platform. We borrow a lot of things from what we see in console games, and we see console games borrowing a lot from what mobile (games) are doing. The audiences are the one audience often… It’s not two completely separate groups of people. The way we think about platforms is really: ‘what is the best version of our game for this platform, and how do people want to play? Do they want to sit down and have a longer session because they’ve got controllers in their hands?’ Versus ‘I’ve maybe just remembered about this app between doing something more serious on my phone.’ 

I think most of us at the studio have worked on console games, PC games, and most platforms. So we bring all of that knowledge when we work between different platforms. I think a lot of that information, and the tool set and design thinking crosses over quite a lot. I’m seeing that in the console games and PC games that I play as well. There’s so much similarity. There wasn’t that similarity, maybe five years ago, 10 years ago. The way that the monetization in particular worked was so different, and they’re really much more similar now.

TH: Talking about these games that have really grabbed you, do you have any examples of things that you’ve really sunk a lot of time into? Maybe embarrassingly so?

CR: Oh my gosh, yeah, I’m sure I do. (laughs) I’m a big RTS fan. My default game is Civilization. That’s my comfort game. I think it says something about someone who works in strategy, people management.

I’m not great at games, and I think that also helps me in working at a studio where we’re talking to a broader, more casual audience. I am often a reminder to people that not everyone is good at games. I just don’t have the time to become super brilliant at the games that I love. Like in Overwatch, I was never ranked very well, but I had a great time. That kind of play is still really valuable. I think that that stays an important thing at Hipster Whale because we talk to such a broad audience. It’s always about making it really easy to play and then hard to master, but you should still be having heaps of fun at that easy to play level.

TH: The final thing that I want to ask is about project management at Hipster Whale.You are a team that has a game that you have been working on for a decade, and continually have to revisit and make sure that you’re keeping that alive. But you do have other projects. How do you decide to balance between making sure you’re keeping Crossy Road supported and diverting personnel onto other projects that can keep a fresh injection of new ideas?

CR: We’re a team of very passionate creators, and I have to keep them fed. I have to keep them creatively engaged and make sure that they all feel like they can flex their creative muscle. And sometimes when you’re working on the same game for a really long time, you need to just try something else every now and again. We did a game jam at the start of this year where the whole team went pens down on everything. It’s really important at the studio to have times where we do that and everyone can just bring those sideways ideas that have been there. They want to work on it, but it’s hard to find the time during the day, so we make space for that. We got a bunch of awesome games out of it, but also the team was energized by it. We have six projects that are live right now. Mobile is like a thousand platforms (laughs). Then Samsung just goes like, “Hey, we’re going to make a flip phone!” And you’re like, “what?!”

TH: Now you have to work on that. That’s very interesting.

CR: “We’re not short on things to do, or platforms that we’re supporting. Last year we put one of our games out across consoles. It was really enjoyable for the team. Some have had recent console experience, some haven’t worked on consoles for five years or more. That was a really fun one for the team. It’s just about finding or waiting for the right release plan for a project. It might be that we even have something and we aren’t quite sure what to do with it, but then a new platform comes out and we can say, ‘Ah, there you go, that’s where that can go.’ We do pull these things into Crossy Road as well. Some of the characters are almost like a new game, it’s a different mechanic. We can put these things into the games that we have, or make it a minigame, maybe make an event around it. I think it’s really important for our studio that those things are there because it keeps us really excited. 

TH: If someone wants to be a team leader, is there anything that you might have messed up along the way that you want to teach to other people?

CR: The list of things I’ve stuffed up to learn is long (laughs)! For me, leadership is something that can be done in so many ways. I think you need a certain level of confidence built in order to know that you don’t know everything, and to be okay with that. That actually is what gives me a lot of confidence in what I see in the senior people and other business leaders that I respect. They don’t have all the answers, and they’re comfortable with that. They know that a part of what we do is work with uncertainty and try to remove risk. Get more certain by experimentation, by trying things out, removing the things that don’t work, and continuing the things that do. 

The role of leadership is not to have all the answers. It’s to collaborate. It’s not about telling everyone what  to do (laughs). I’d say people trying out leadership for the first time may misunderstand that. I know nothing! That’s the most important thing I know!