BUILDING CULTURE LIKE PIXAR

A BROWSER MANIFESTO – PART 11

Historically most films have been live action shot by independent production teams, while most video games have been made by independent third-party developers under a similar kind of contract with a publisher. Pixar is radically different because they are a technology company that systematically leverages tools. We do something similar and like Pixar, have found that it is easier to implement under your own roof with your own staff. Just for starters this eliminates questions about direction, ownership and sharing. But there is much more to it.

To create a systematic competitive advantage a game developer needs to be building a system, not a game. The organization must become part of this system. It begins with corporate culture and values and you want people that have the desire and confidence to innovate and collaborate. Strategically you are going to be better off if your people believe they can make a great, new original game because you’ll get less market share in a clone war and less revenue share if you are always licensing other people’s brands. It will also make an enormous difference if you can convince everyone to use the same tools and to collaborate on a technology roadmap and the sharing of Best Practices. This way everyone can learn from internal experts about how to use tools and metrics to make games that drive traffic, retain customers and monetize better.

These kinds of things beg for a centralized organization with everyone in the same building to improve communications and management. However, I will instead argue for a global organization with several medium-sized offices. The market is global and if your employees aren’t global you’ll remain too foreign for many potential customers. Our office in Finland is an interesting melting pot all by itself because people born in 35 different countries have worked there. They have a good idea of global tastes because it is in the building. Costs are also much more competitive when you are global, as compared to only being in an expensive city like San Francisco or London. In many of our seven locations the turnover rate and organizational churn are also lower because we’re the best game company in town – simply because there are fewer competitors of note.

To make such a structure work we ask everyone to communicate in English, we make extensive use of tools like email, IM and Skype and we gratefully get people to participate in conference calls that have to span a lot of time zones. We are respectful and courteous about the demands and it works because everyone is learning much faster and advancing in their career. It seems like every office has some big brother offices that they aspire to follow, and some little brother offices that they are training and managing on some projects. This process allows the most advanced people to take on exciting new work by enabling them to hand down mastered categories to a new owner for whom it is a chance to advance and grow. Pixar continues to be a great role model for us. Harvard Business School was sufficiently fascinated by how we do it that they wrote a case study about Digital Chocolate: http://hbr.org/product/digital-chocolate/an/410049-PDF-ENG.