Q&A: FROM SONY TO STARTUP

DAM: David, talk to me a little bit about your pre-Eat Sleep Play years at Sony.

David Jaffe: Well, I was a Sony employee for 14 years, which was the first game job I ever had right out of college, and I worked my way up from tester to the creative director of Sony Santa Monica where I did a bunch of games, namely the “Twisted Metal” and “God Of War” series, and a few others. It was there that I had a good working relationship with Scott [Campbell, president and co-founder of Eat Sleep Play] who had started Incognito Studios and then ultimately sold it to Sony.

DAM: So when he sold Incognito to Sony, you decided to go with him? How did that work?

Jaffe: What happened was that he sold Incognito to Sony and became a Sony employee. Then, eventually, his contract as part of the buyout ended at around the time that I finished “God Of War.” At that point, I said I’ve done all I’m going to do at Sony as an employee, he decided that he wanted to be independent again, and together we said that we’d worked together on and off for 13 years and it just seemed like a really good time to join up and start a company.

DAM: What is most surprising, I believe, is that both of you left really cushy jobs at Sony to go back to being a small developer. How do you explain that?

Jaffe: All I can say is that I had had for 14 years the amazingly generous and consistent and dependable lifeline that was Sony, and it had become real easy to get used to that and get spoiled by that. You know, coming out of college where I had no money, when they brought me in as a tester and told me I’d be making $20,000 a year, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. But there comes a time when you start doing well for yourself -- Sony is a good company in terms of bonuses and royalties and such -- and we had some hits. That’s when you start wanting other things. Scott and I looked around the industry, understood we’d been integral in a number of franchises that made other people hundreds of millions of dollars and, while we’d been rewarded well as employees, it seemed to us that there was a lot more money to be made in this business. Also, we’d had all sorts of creative control within the walls of Sony, but we weren’t really seeing the kind of financial payday that we felt we could potentially generate for ourselves. So we decided to take a risk, walk away from the safety of a big company, and take a shot at the brass ring.

DAM: You went right from Sony to Eat Sleep Play?

Jaffe: Yes, we were real lucky in that we have a lot of great relationships still with Sony and we rolled right out of our last game together with Sony -- which was a game for the PlayStation Network called “Calling All Cars” -- and immediately set up a three-game deal on the console side with them. So very little has changed other than Scott and I are both making less money. But we know that if we do really well and make gamers really happy there’s a chance that we can see some real payout from this. Everyone on the team can since we all own a piece of the company.

DAM: But now you have a risk. And you say you’re making less money.

Jaffe: Yes, and we don’t have that massive machine behind us that can sustain us and protect us. However, on the plus side, we’re in control of our own destiny. At Sony, you never knew when someone in Japan might wake up and decide to lay off an entire division of people for whatever reason that has absolutely nothing to do with you or how you’ve performed. So it’s actually very freeing to be out of that possibility. Yes, there now exists the possibility that we can screw up or we can be a company that’s not very good and can’t find any work. But at least that’s directly in our hands.

DAM: So tell me a little bit about Eat Sleep Play. When did it start and …

Jaffe: It started in July of 2007. Everybody is based in Utah except me. The programmers, artists, and designers are there with Scott who is running the day-to-day operations and he and I are both handling creative duties on the titles. I work out of my home in San Diego. We have 25-30 people. Neither Scott nor I is looking to become a huge company. We all know each other’s names and all we want is to make a big name for ourselves in the medium-size and the small, casual game space. We’ll probably be doing a little outsourcing in order to keep the company a manageable size. Our first game comes out in February which is sort of a port with a lot of additions to a game we already made. And our first real brand new game will come out at the end of 2009 or the start of 2010.

DAM: You want to be more specific about those games?

Jaffe: The port is “Twisted Metal: Head On” for the PS2 which is basically a port of a PSP game that Incognito made. But we’ve gone back and improved the graphics, changed the gameplay, and added four new levels. And we really can’t talk about the new games because Sony hasn’t announced them.

DAM: What is the company’s focus? How do you differentiate Eat Sleep Play from Incognito, for example?

Jaffe: At first, we said let’s make a big name for ourselves in the casual game space. The problem is that the market is so fragmented right now that we’re not even sure yet where the money is at the level that we want to make it. So we’re exploring that space -- for console and for PC -- very doggedly. But, at the same time, we’re also seeing that there are a lot of fans out there for medium-sized games. I did “God Of War” which is a huge, epic, single-player game that took three years to make and many, many, many millions of dollars. Then we went to a sub-$1-million “Calling All Cars” which was a PlayStation Network game. It’s our contention that there’s a range in between those two that gamers still respond to. And so our focus is kind of shifting between really small and inexpensive casual games and kind of medium-size console games. Somewhere in the space we’ll find our sweet spot.

DAM: You’ve been in the indie business for seven months now. What advice would you give other developers who might want to create a startup?

Jaffe: The most important thing is contacts. Connections have been really important for the life of Eat Sleep Play. Even though we had other interested publishers who wanted to work with us, Sony really feels like family to us. You know, I always heard that networking and connections are really important, but it’s only now that I realize that if it weren’t for these amazing relationships that we forged as Sony employees, we would never have gotten the great deal that we have with Sony.

The other thing is that we have a really good team. You’ve got to have your core -- your programmers, your artists, your designers, and somebody who can actually run production -- because not only do you need to show a publisher your demo, but because games are getting more and more expensive, you need to make the publisher feel comfortable that there’s a management structure in place here, that there’s a production pipeline that’s been logically thought out. If you’re a startup, you really have to be able to show a publisher that you can actually get the work done. That means that if you have to spend a little extra time and go out and find those other key people who are going to help you, you need to do that. It really is like forming a rock band; you’ve got to make sure you’ve got all the instruments being played really well.

Lastly, take advantage of the fact that there are now places like PlayStation Network and Xbox Live Arcade that are suitable for much, much smaller development teams, perhaps even as small as 1- and 2-man teams.

DAM: It sounds like you have no regrets about leaving Sony and starting up your own company.

Jaffe: None. Even if it turns out that our company doesn’t do as good a job as I know it will, now that I’ve gotten a taste of this, the only reason I’d go back to being an employee at someone else’s company is because I was busy trying to get my next startup off the ground and I needed to have a steady paycheck while I was doing that. Because once you’ve become an indie, if it’s in your makeup to enjoy that sort of thing, the level of creative freedom and possibility that lies before you is so addictive. I’m not saying it’s for everybody; it’s absolutely not for everybody. But, for me, yes, I have absolutely no regrets. I wish I had done it sooner.