In this episode contributor Reid Manning sits down with Charles Yu, the founder and CEO of Voxpop Games, a peer to peer game distribution and development platform. Together, they discuss the launch of the Voxpop platform and their mission of supporting streamers and developers by utilizing profit sharing with marketing.

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Alyssa: Hello AMT Lab listeners. Welcome to an interview episode brought to you by The Arts Management and Technology Lab. My name is Alyssa and I'm the Podcast Producer.

Please note that we are recording this episode as of April 11 2020. During the Coronavirus pandemic. We are practicing social distancing by recording over Zen Caster. Therefore, you may hear differences in the audio quality, particularly as we switch from speaker to speaker. We hope you enjoy this episode brought to you by AMT lab.

Reid: So, hi Charles. It's great to finally meet you. Thank you so much for taking the time to come and talk to us about Voxpop games. So, just to get started, could you please introduce yourself and Voxpop the company in your own words?

Charles: Absolutely. And thank you for having me, by the way.

I've always felt a little awkward talking about myself. But I guess the important thing to note is, I'm sort of an independent developer, as well as a somewhat recent graduate as a game design major. And, one thing I noticed not just from my own personal experiences, but also from talking to other people in the space, people who are even more experienced than me as well as just how little support there is for independent developers and how easy it is to get buried in the market, when we just don't have the same resources as bigger companies. So, what I really want to do with Voxpop was to create a platform that would sort of power these kinds of independent resources and just Perform the services I wish I had. We can go into a little more detail later. But the core of the Voxpop platform, which we're currently launching our beta of is a peer to peer game distribution platform with a profit sharing business model.

Reid: Very cool. So I actually knew that you’ve worked with games as both a designer and a reviewer and I was curious if there was a particular barrier or moment in time in your experience that led to the idea of Voxpop. Was there a singular core issue that made you think that this product needs to be on the market?

Charles: [Laughter] Well, like I said, I'll probably botch this anecdote, but I've been making games since high school. But obviously, making money wasn't, you know, the biggest concern for me at the time. So, it's okay if I didn't, you know, make any money. Because I figured that's just something that would come. So, I went to college to study game design. A lot of my professors were amazing independent developers themselves. People that I had idolized. And it was going great until senior year, when we had this class called survival skills. And basically what happened was every week they would bring in guests to lecture about specific jobs in the games industry, how to get started, who to contact, you know, what your day to day work looks like, etc. You know, very practical stuff, right? And, week one was how to be an independent game designer. And one of my professors, I'll try to be vague about it, because I don't know if they want this to be public info. But, they challenged us to guess how much money they had made in the five years leading up to their professorship as an independent game designer. And, the answer was $15,000.

So, this was disheartening for a lot of reasons. especially since because, you know, while I never imagined that I would be rich, I had still kind of hoped I would be able to make a living as a game designer. And they went into a lot of detail about a lot of the difficulties facing independent developers and I did a lot of research myself. And I realized that one of the biggest problems, for, that indie games face is visibility. Developers really, indie devs, a lot of the time, they don't really have a go to market strategy, besides putting their game on Steam and praying, right? And, even if you have a really solid go to market strategy, you might not have the money to actually, you know, put it in place. And, that was the main inspiration behind Voxpop was at that moment. Obviously pivoted a lot since then, during the fundraising process, and then later On during the hiring process, and development pivoted a lot from the original inception. But yeah, it was that sort of desperation and dream crushing pain that initially kick started the idea.

Reid: Yeah, I've definitely done a lot of my own independent research into the video game industry. And it is a tough, tough market to make a living at, for sure. You actually touched on an article, I think, I believe you wrote that you guys posted on your website recently that we cannot quote the title of but we may we will probably see to the link into the podcast itself. But, a lot of the issues that you pointed out are actually a lot of the same issues. nonprofits are facing very much. So. Yeah.

Charles: Yeah. Oh, sorry. I didn't mean to interrupt.

Reid: [Laughter] No, go ahead.

Charles: [Laughter] Sorry. So, what I was going to say is, it's a problem that a lot of like smaller companies definitely face because they don't have the same resources that big corporations do. And so, they often get crowded out. It's really an attention economy, right. And in that regard, I believe that independent developers are very much similar to nonprofit organizations.

Reid: Absolutely. I agree with you there. Just thinking about how, especially going into the fact that many nonprofits and many small game developers do not have a go to market strategy. I'm curious how your company or how you personally have leveraged social media and other networking tools within your company.

Charles: Could you clarify a little bit what you mean by within your company? Do you mean just how we sort of built our online following a little bit or were you talking about something more specific than that?

Reid: Sure. So what I'm looking to figure out is, I guess your online social media strategy, like how do you guys go about one, creating your following and how are you using social media to achieve the goals of your organization.

Charles: Well, I'm afraid that there's nothing really super novel or flashy. What we really tried to do was to get into existing developer communities that sort of needed the same things that we did. And to point out like, “Hey, we're trying to create something to sort of make things better for everyone.” And, once you can get the attention of a couple key people in that community, then you can sort of grow through that community as well. Right? A good example of that is a discord group called indie dev world order. They were a support group for independent developers. And one of the first places we went to try and find developers and get feedback. Right? It's the same thing with streamers. I believe in our email communications, I also mentioned the IGDA.

Reid: Yes, Yes, you did.

Charles: They are sort of the closest thing to a Game Development Union that exists. Both Mark, my partner Mark, and I are members of the IGDA already. And so we looked for partnerships with them as well. And another group that we actively sought partnerships with was Play Crafting New York, another developer community, you know. So, we sort of grew by tackling these communities and the people in them and occasionally we also grew by a complete fluke, like our LinkedIn following literally doubled overnight after Trip Hawkins connected with us. [Laughter] I can't pretend that that was directly the result of our scheming. That was all, that was a complete fluke.

Reid: That's so funny. [Laughter] So, it sounds like a little bit of planning and a little bit to a lot of luck.

Charles: A lot of luck might be a bit of exaggeration, but Well, yeah, I mean, like, luck is a component in every strategy, right? The best laid plans of mice and men, they sometimes go awry, right? And it, what's important is knowing how to capitalize on the opportunity when it comes. And, knowing your audience as well and where they congregate is also very important.

Reid: We actually talk a lot about knowing your audience in nonprofit realms. So that is definitely a jumping off point I think I'll take. So you did mention peer to peer and profit sharing as part of your business model. I'm curious as to Well, first of all, nonprofits are probably fairly familiar with the peer to peer business model. However, they might not think of it in a peer to peer sense in an online environment. But the peer to peer model is very similar to the way that nonprofits operate and try to spread their information around-

Charles: If I-

Reid: And I was curious. Oh, go ahead.

Charles: [Laughter] I was just going to say, actually, one of the inspirations behind the model was a nonprofit. It was the Girl Scouts Association of America, right?

Reid: Wow.

Charles: [Laughter] Though, Yeah, I mean, again, we had to adapt the model for our market. But, it's very much this kind of affiliate structure is very much something that exists in nonprofits already.

Reid: Absolutely. So, what I was curious is, how are you guys implementing your peer to peer, your peer to peer model? And, I've read a lot about the profit sharing model that makes a lot of sense to me. I'm just, I'm curious as to how you're implementing peer to peer. The only comparison I can really think of in my own experience has been LimeWire, and I'm trying to figure out how it's different from that.

Charles: Well, actually, in a way, it's similar to LimeWire. Of course, one of the problems with peer to peer networks that existed before right. like LimeWire or why is it skipping my mind? The music one?

Reid: Napster?

Charles: Napster, yes. Is that very easy to transfer malware, right? Not a lot of security and I know this is kind of a dirty word among gamers online these days, but also not a lot of DRM. So, a lot of artists might be getting, you know, the short end of the stick there, right? Not as big of a deal when you're stealing from a big corporation. But when you're stealing from an independent, that can really hurt, right? So, what we wanted to do was, essentially, we are creating our own security layer on top of it. And we are also we also have a packer that bundles some software together with each game and flags them. So that's also how you know the file you're getting is safe and efficient. The benefit to the consumer is several fold. One is you can download from multiple peers at the same time, so it can drastically improve your speed. It's also a simple way to distribute files. This is probably not going to be part of our beta, but I want at some point we want to introduce the ability for people to be able to distribute their own files, before it really enters our main storefront, right? So you can see what files are on offer nearby. And so, this would be one of the ways we might introduce new files and new games is seeing what's nearby. And, it also just lets you see what's popular among the people around you.

Reid: Yeah, that sounds very, very, very cool. I am really liking the idea, the more I read about it every time.

Charles: From a business standpoint, another benefit of having a peer to peer network like this. To be honest, I don't know how applicable This is to nonprofits. But, one benefit of the peer to peer network structure is that we personally have to handle less of the data. Because users might pull data from nearby computers instead of directly from us. That reduces the strain on our back end, which means that we don't have to shell out a ton of money for servers that have to always be ready to handle the theoretically, you know, largest amount of traffic they might get. And, since we can't afford to have dedicated servers that powerful constantly running, you know, we might, and we're using virtual servers, right? This is actually a very big benefit to us and our operating costs.

Reid: That's actually a really interesting point, because one of the things that that we're trying to communicate to nonprofits is that it's not always reinventing the wheel. And, it's not always find the most work heavy thing to do. So, when the fact that you guys are able to set up a back end, where you don't have to worry about the theoretical max load every single day is actually a really applicable thing for nonprofits, I believe.

Charles: Should I talk a little bit about the profit sharing and how it affects developers or are we going to touch on that?

Reid: I was actually just about to get there. So, you covered the streamer, the developer and the people that advertise games to their friends through your profit sharing model, and I was curious, actually, how do you guys make money on your platform?

Charles: Oh, we take a percentage of every sale. It's basically the same deal that's existed. You know, as you mentioned, it's not really about reinventing the wheel in this case. But, we take a smaller percentage, partially due to the fact that we have lower overhead and partially due to the fact that one of the goals of having this platform is to accelerate adoption of these games.

Reid: So, you did mention that you were launching your beta platform on April 20. So, how are the preparations for that going? And, can you give us any details on the platform itself? I did notice a picture in the discord server. So, I have that with me.

Charles: Well, I can tell you that development is going well. We are on track for our 4/20 launch. I mean, as for details on the platform. Oof, I'm sorry. I, uh, if you have any more specific questions I could certainly talk about it's a bit of a broad topic. You know what I mean?

Reid: Very true. I mean, if there's anything you're comfortable talking about?

Charles: What one thing I do want to say, though, is that 4/20 would be our closed beta. So we're not launching open beta quite yet. And as you imagine, one of the purposes of closed beta, is bug testing and stress testing certain features, right? So, the closed beta version of our platform is by no means the final version of our platform. I suppose that's the major thing I would like to stress.

Reid: No, absolutely. Yeah, the alpha, pre alpha, beta, closed beta, all that things, all those. All those gateways are very interesting and definitely works in progress. So, we are aware of that. So, we were talking earlier about digital strategy a little bit, mostly in the realm of social media. I was curious, when you guys were basically developing the business concept and the strategy for breaking into a streaming platform marketplace where there's already some big players who have captured the majority of the market I’m curious as to what strategies you guys thought about, if you can talk about that.

Charles: I can't talk too much in detail about what we're planning to do with streamers, in part because some of it, my partner has advised that I should keep secret but also, in part because a little bit of this is also a little in flux as we work together with streamers and get feedback from them. One thing I should clarify, it appears there might have been some confusion. We're not creating a whole new streaming platform, what we want to do is sort of piggyback off of streamers on Twitch and on other platforms to help promote independent developers. See, one thing you may have noticed is that very, very few streamers play indie games. Every once in a while there's a fluke indie hit, that becomes a viral sensation, like Getting Over It, or the Untitled Goose Game, but in general, most streamers tend to focus on big budget titles, especially Free to Play titles or, you know, blizzards games. Right? So, games like Hearthstone or Overwatch or Fortnite are sort of evergreen. But, if you're an indie dev breaking into that is really difficult. Right? So, really what we wanted to do was get the few indie streamers there are and help them make ends meet. And, then get streamers who would be interested in streaming indie games, but are normally afraid of the opportunity costs and connect them to developers who can create these like profit sharing special deals with them and whatnot to get the content out there. But we're not creating like a new Twitch, my apologies if there was confusion.

Reid: No, that was that was totally on me. Thank you for the clarification. I misinterpreted it in my research. So, thank you very much for that clarification. So, you guys are kind of an intermediary between consumers slash viewers, streamers and developers.

Charles: Exactly.

Reid: Very interesting, more of a blue ocean than I was actually expecting. So, going back to the idea that Voxpop thinks of games, especially indie development games, at the, as the intersection between arts and technology. We talked a little bit about this, but do you feel that the company's strategy of P2P, profit sharing, or certain aspects of that model are applicable to nonprofits?

Charles: Well, as I already mentioned, one of the inspirations behind the model was the Girl Scouts of America. Right? But I would say that the model as it exists primarily is very gaming centric, right? I haven't, I haven't quite had the chance to touch on this in depth yet, but the whole strategy of using profit sharing to reach influencers, right, as a tool of negotiating with them, plus the way the influencer market is structured at all is very much gaming centric, right, and digital assets centric. I think those things don't necessarily apply to most nonprofits. However, at its very core when you strip away the profit sharing side and the sort of Peer to Peer aspect, what you're really left with is an affiliate structure. And yes, I already mentioned at least one nonprofit that has used that affiliate structure to very good effect. In fact, the profit sharing affiliate structure might actually work better for a nonprofit than a for profit company in a sense, because you don't need to worry about your margins as much. So you could potentially afford to share more of the profit. Now, granted, I would try to find a way to dress it up, because just plain sharing money would probably be bad for optics. For a nonprofit company. I think most of the public doesn't even understand that most nonprofits seek revenue at all, let alone, you know, seeking to break even or anything more complicated than that. So obviously, you might need to find some levels of abstraction there. Similar to how the Girl Scouts of America have their little badges, right? But yeah, an affiliate structure works perfectly well for a nonprofit and in fact profit sharing itself might actually be better suited for nonprofits than for profits.

Reid: That's actually a really interesting point. I'd never thought of it that way. So when this is kind of going back a little bit of ways, but I was curious, now that I understand a bit better what your company is doing, as opposed to being like a another version of twitch or mixer or something like that. Who do you guys actually consider to be competitors with you?

Charles: I guess the closest direct competitor we have would be itch.io they're really the only other indie centric platform that exists. Now, you might say, “Well, what about humble?” but you don't really go to humble to make a profit. These pay what you want structures mean you don't get any money, usually. And that's a, yeah, nonprofit store. And, I already wrote an article about why indie games don't tend to perform well on Steam. So yeah, I believe itch.io is probably our closest direct competitor. Obviously in terms of digital distribution for video games. Steam is the biggest player still, but one of the interesting things about these kinds of digital markets is exclusivity is not something that most of these platforms really seek anymore. When you want to create some kind of exclusive deal with a developer, you sort of have to cover their potential losses from all the platforms, they're not launching on. And, on PC it's exponentially more expensive with all the potential avenues that you could go to, not to mention indie devs very rarely get these kinds of deals regardless. So, while itch.io might be a direct competitor, and Steam might sort of be like a big fish in this space, their existence doesn't necessarily mean we can't carve out a niche for ourselves.

Reid: I will agree with you there. Steam is definitely not the place a lot of indie games want to be on and they don't really have the opportunity to even spend money on advertising. They're so expensive.

Charles: There are a lot of other hurdles to developing for Steam too, but I won't bog you down for that. [Laughter]

Reid: Oh, I'm sure I only know the tip of the iceberg. [Laughter]

But I know especially one example recently was the Epic Games store with all their exclusives because nobody wanted to use Epic Games because of the back end spyware they had. And they had to do all those Epic exclusives in order to get some adoption up.

Charles: Well, I can tell you that from a developer standpoint, the Epic store is frustrating. So, on the surface, it looks like they take less money than Steam, right? Because Steam takes 30% of every sale, sometimes more, and Epic came along and they're like, “Hey, you launch on our store, we're only gonna take 12% of your game.” Right? But one of the requirements for launching on the Epic store was using the Unreal Engine and if you develop your game in the Unreal Engine, they take a percentage of the revenue from that game.

Reid: Oh, wow! Really?

Charles: So, they're essentially double tapping on the amount of money they're taking away from you as well.

Reid: Wow, I had no idea about the Unreal Engine commission portion.

Charles: Yeah, I mean, that's where Epic got most of their money was the Unreal Engine actually.

Reid: That's very interesting. Thank you. That brings us to the end of the questions I've sent you. I mean, if there's anything else you want to talk about and that you want to make our readers aware of or our listeners aware of. You're welcome to do that now.

Charles: Yes. Actually, I don't believe I got a chance to touch in depth on how exactly independent developers would use the Voxpop platform to market. And, I think this is the part that might be actually most interesting for nonprofits. So, the whole idea is that developers, independent developers especially, don't have a lot of money upfront. Right? So, you can't spend money on advertisements. And, it also means your ability to engage influencers is very limited, any influencer with an audience they're going to be looking for their next paycheck. They're looking for paid sponsorships. You know, how can they make money? It's not about being greedy. It's just about staying afloat, right? So, a lot of them don't really have time for indie devs. So, the idea behind the Voxpop platform, which we've pivoted on many times, exactly the implementation, was trying to allow developers to leverage their future earnings to market, because if you don't have money in your pocket right now, what can you do? Well, you can promise a percentage of the profit that you're going to get. So the point of the platform is to allow developers to go up to influencers and say, like, “Hey, if you help me, I'll give you 40% or 30%, or whatever of all the sales you generate.” Then the platform tracks where the sales are coming from, who is recommending them, that kind of stuff. Everybody who had a hand in getting the game sold, they get to share in the game’s success, and you get to reach an audience you otherwise normally wouldn't have.

Reid: You actually touched on something that I would like to dig into if, if I have a second.

Charles: Oh, yes, go ahead.

Reid: So nonprofits actually, typically, and it sounds like you guys have already thought about this in depth, but nonprofits have always had a hard time creating systems in which to track themselves and evaluate their programs on. And, it sounds like you guys have a really in depth back end. That tracks all these things. So, I'm curious, from your point of view, how important is it to have these types of metrics and benchmarking to hold yourself accountable?

Charles: I think it's extremely important for parties to trust you, that you have a way to track them. Right? So, the whole reason there needs to be a Voxpop platform is because this main process, right, of engaging influencers with potential future revenue, has no accountability. Right? So, if I went up to a streamer right now and said, “Hey, I'm launching this new game, you know, I'd like you to play it on your channel for your audience. I'd like you to recommend it to everybody, I'll give you a percentage of the sale.” Right? The streamer is going to need to trust that I the developer, am going to be honest and give them the money that they deserve. And then, I the developer, right, I'm going to need to somehow acquire the accounting skill, the metrics, and to figure out how much money this guy deserves, how much I owe him. And, that's time lost, that's productivity lost, as well, even if I had the ability to do that. And, there's Just a lack of trust in the system as well. That's why there needs to be a platform like this, which can do what ordinary people might not have the ability to do. Now, again, I'm not certain, without knowing exactly what kind of structure you're talking about, for nonprofits in this case, I can't evaluate exactly how important this sort of structure is. But I can tell you that in any system, where you're asking somebody to trust you trust that in the future, you will be able to pay them to trust that you will be honest with them, right? There needs to be something more comprehensive there than just your good work.

Reid: Wonderful. Thank you so much for that. I definitely believe that in general nonprofits, definitely need to think about that more. And definitely in more depth. We're thinking, we're taking a very high level approach to this research topic and looking at a generalized version of nonprofits. So, depending on whether or not they go online, they'll have, they could or could not need these types of systems in order to track themselves. But yeah, I did interrupt your thought earlier. So, if you wanted to finish that I don't have any other questions that I need to get to.

Charles: Well, I guess one other thing that maybe I wanted to touch on earlier, one of the other hurdles that developers face on Steam is that, you, in order to get your game on Steam, you need to integrate with the Steamworks API. They have a packer that will do it automatically. But, it doesn't work for games that have external libraries or dependencies, aka every game made in unity. Or, I think unreal as well, actually. So, that means indie games have to go through a whole other song and dance to integrate their games with Steamworks. And, they can demand things of you like you must have achievements or you must have multiplayer. They can force all sorts of design constraints on you, which you might not have the money or the manpower to do.

Reid: Interesting. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today, Charles. it was a pleasure, and it was very interesting and we've learned a lot.

Charles: Yes, absolutely.

Alyssa: Thanks for listening to the Arts Management and Technology Lab podcast series. You can read more on the intersection between the arts and technology at www.amt-lab.org Or, you can listen to more interviews and discussions in our podcast series on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play or Stitcher. Thank you for joining us.

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