or soccer or baseball,
and I don’t know, that’s going to be really up
to the players to decide.
– [Marc] Players do things with their champions
we’d never even imagine, the designers would imagine,
and we sort of evolved that understanding
together with the community.
– [Commentator] Missing, oh the flash!
They got him.
– Whether you think you can do it,
or you think you can not, you are right.
– What’s up, believe nation?
It’s Evan, my one word is “believe”,
and I believe that you have the ability
to do something special that can change the planet,
so to help you on your journey,
today we’re going to learn from the CEO of Riot Games,
Brandon Beck and my takes on his top 10 rules for success.
(inspiring classical music)
– You have to have an almost idealistic belief
in what you’re doing because if you
take a linear, logical perspective
on what you’re trying to accomplish as a start-up,
if that makes sense, it’s almost,
the start is almost not ambitious enough
and if it doesn’t make sense then it
can be like staring into the abyss of
how the hell is this ever going to work?
And there just sort of needs to be,
that old saying where there’s a will,
there’s a way, there just needs to be that
belief almost idealistically, almost
not based in rational thinking,
that we can sort of pull this off, somehow.
And at least for us that was,
that was key, believing in sort of a
non-linear path to success.
It’s hard for us to sort of resonate with
how well the game has been doing,
and it’s like the ultimate compliment.
It is the best feeling in the world
to see players enthusiastic about the product.
And like, well you guys are here for the
world finals coming up tomorrow,
the, I mean, that is like a dream come true for us.
We’ve always wanted E-sports to be at that scale,
but we never even believed that that
would be possible.
I remember one day like we were in a team meeting,
we just got the results from the survey back
and we’d ask players if they enjoy watching the game
in addition to playing it.
And the number was, something like 70%
of players enjoyed watching it, and we’re like,
no way, that has to be wrong.
We enjoy watching it, but that’s what we do,
we make games, like there’s no 70%,
and in fact, that was an accurate number,
and then it was validated by the sort
of the viewership numbers for our first tournament,
we were like, holy crap, green light
for going ape on making phenomenal,
on building a phenomenal e-sports experience.
And that’s been so much fun to just run with.
We want the sport to be big and awesome,
but I want to make one distinction clear,
we’re not trying to make this a mainstream sport,
a lot of people ask us,
hey guys, are e-sports going to become as big
as football or soccer or baseball?
And I don’t know, that’s going to be really
up to the players to decide.
But that’s not a specific goal.
But the goal is to deliver a great experience
for the already large community
that really cares about it,
so that’s the focus, the goal isn’t to
make e-sports as mass market or big as possible.
I think that’s kind of just forcing,
trying to force it, and it has to happen organically.
Well this is the 2004 USA men’s national basketball team.
And these guys were stacked, right?
US was talent stacked on talent, stacked on talent,
and you got LeBron, you got Dwayne Wade,
you got Carmelo Anthony.
You got Duncan, Iverson, and this would have been
the highest paid team in the history of pro-sports, right?
But does anyone remember what happened in Athens?
Right, they got dumped on by Puerto Rico,
and then they lost subsequent games to
Lithuania, and Argentina.
They weren’t supposed to lose a single game,
they were supposed to run the entire table
to the Gold Medal.
They were massive favorites.
So while talent can win you games (chuckles),
it is teamwork that wins championships.
Back in high school, I was diagnosed with ADHD.
Sot he classroom was a pretty painful place.
It was hard work to spend more than half
a minute’s attention in any lecture
regardless of how much I enjoyed the subject matter.
And by the way, I mention this
not because I’m seeking sympathy,
but I want to emphasize that we all
have different handicaps, and it’s how
we choose to handle them that’s what’s important.
We can be paralyzed by self-pity,
we can lower our expectations,
we can give up entirely.
But those of us who choose to power through
and simply opt for redoubling our efforts,
improve our chances for success dramatically.
And I think to really make something great,
you have to be passionate about it.
It comes into like, even like hiring criteria,
when people joining Riot Games,
there’s two things we look for:
one is just their aptitude, their talent,
and then the other thing is their passion,
and we care way more about those two things
than like their experience for example,
because we think that you have to love,
you have to love what you do,
you have to love the game,
you have to understand the game too,
’cause it’s easy to come in having been
a really experienced artist or really
experienced game designer,
but have no comprehension for
how League of Legends is so different
from a lot of conventional games,
or a lot of conventional wisdom breaks down.
Weak culture can allow people to just drift.
And a strong culture can sort of act
as this membrane that keeps large, diverse
groups of people working in alignment.
In every company, every company has a culture.
Whether they acknowledge and are deliberate
about it or not.
Culture is sort of this living, breathing,
evolving idea and it takes consistent
effort over time to synthesize,
to codify, and then ultimately to teach.
And I love this analogy,
and I’m just going to take a survey real quick,
but who in this audience is like me,
and you, raise your hand if you really like
black licorice.
Okay, handful of you guys.
A lot of people right there.
Now, who in this audience looks
at this image like, that is freaking disgusting,
I hate black licorice?
Tons of you guys.
(chuckles) Now who in this audience is
really ambivalent, ah black licorice, whatever,
I have it sometimes, okay.
Very few of you, right?
Now, who in this audience is
ambivalent about vanilla ice cream?
You don’t hate it, it’s not the
first thing you order at Baskin N’ Robbins either.
Okay, almost everyone, right?
And that’s kind of the difference here,
as a culture, you don’t want to be plain vanilla.
You don’t want to be a catch-all flavor
that is something for everyone, right?
That’s dangerous, it just waters down your culture.
You want to be black licorice.
You want to be cilantro.
You want to be Uni, you want to be Brussel sprouts,
you want to stand for something, right?
And then you’ll be a magnet for cultural fits.
And others will self-select out.
And Riot was an ambitious endeavor for us,
to say the least, but it was a pursuit of passion.
We’ve always loved video games,
and we saw an opportunity to do things differently,
and improve the traditional model.
High quality, high-production value video games
had always been in this packaged goods business,
but we thought online and multiplayer-centric games
would be better as online services
than as packaged goods.
Why did we need to sell disks anymore?
Who buys any of their digital media,
their other digital media like music or video
at the store versus downloading?
And why do games data cost 60 bucks?
We could make them available for free,
and then just sell optional content a la carte.
And players could opt in only if they saw value.
This would shift the burden on to the
quality of the content and the experience.
And games on disks were static, like movies.
Games would get printed and then the developers
would literally move on to the next project
or sequel, so we thought games should
have live development teams.
Dedicated to evolving the experience
into reacting to user feedback.
We wanted to build a company that saw
the world through the eyes of gamers,
and had a commitment to quality and
a relentless focus on the player experience.
We make mistakes, right?
As you heard me say in the talk a little bit earlier,
making mistakes is kind of part of our culture,
because we feel like if we get to a point
where we’re not making mistakes,
we’re spending too much time covering our butts,
and we’re not moving fast enough,
and we’re not taking enough risks.
But the key is to not make the same mistake twice,
and to learn from our mistakes and to
constantly strive to get better,
so that’s where we, that’s sort of our philosophy.
Who in this audience believes,
without a shred of doubt,
that nothing, not technology, not IP,
not patents, not trademarks, not brands,
not relationships, not any asset
of a game company is worth more than,
to our company’s success than the quality of our teams?
If you believe that without a shadow
of a doubt raise your hand.
Okay, a lot of hands, that’s awesome.
Now raise your hand if that sounds idealistic,
you believe it in your heart,
and you want to believe it but your mind
is just kind of full of questions?
Those other things are pretty important.
Yeah, we’re pretty sure of this, which is great.
Now lastly, raise your hand if
your company, your shareholders,
your boardrooms all believe this
and internalize it the same way you do
without a shred of doubt.
Okay, a lot less hands.
Now this is where I think we have a problem as an industry.
Because until we all agree, until all stakeholders
fully believe in the value
of our people then we struggle
to prioritize what really matters.
And it’s going to hold us back as an industry
from our full potential.
– [Marc] It’s so rewarding to see the passion.
Players do things with our champions
that we didn’t even imagine,
the designers didn’t even imagine.
And we sort of evolved that understanding together
with the community.
– [Commentator] Miss, oh the flash!
Got ’em!
Shally Shall goes down!
(inspiring electronic music)
– [Brandon] When the community creates
a piece of content that just
totally makes you smile or laugh,
I think what they do for us is they just
drive this need to live up to the expectations.
We got to be worthy of this kind of passion.
(audience cheers)
Sometimes we spend so much time
thinking about features, developing something,
and then we lose perspective,
and the community can just keep us honest.
– And those are the times we try to really acknowledge
our mistakes and get better.
I think we both kind of feel a tremendous
amount of gratitude for the
incredible ride we’ve sort of had together,
and the moments that we’ve been touched
by meeting players and seeing their passion
for League and appreciation for a lot of things.
What it’s done, it did help us
grow as people and has been incredible.
– The gratitude that we have is just,
there’s no amount of words that could express it.
– Thank you guys so much for watching,
I made this video because Dennis Vang asked me to.
I’m also a big League of Legends fan,
look me up, Believe Team on the North American Server,
if you want to duel.
If there’s someone you’d like to vote on
for the next Top 10, check out the link
in the description and go and have your say.
Finally, I want to give a quick shout-out
to Nate Lee Morales, Nate, thank you so much
for picking up a copy of my book,
Your One Word, and for having me on your podcast,
it was a ton of fun.
I really, really appreciate the support,
and I’m so glad you enjoyed the read.
So thank you guys again for watching,
I believe in your, I hope you continue
to believe in yourself and whatever your one word is,
much love, I’ll see you soon.
– You know, as you shift your attention
to your future, and to what’s next,
I want you to think about this quote from Henry Ford:
“Whether you think you can do it,
“or you think cannot, you are right”.
Those words are more meaningful today
than I would ever thought
when I was sitting where you are.
I had the same worries about my future as you all have.
But what I would like to think about
is that for the vast majority of you,
the limitations on what you can achieve
are to a very large degree self-imposed.
Whether it is an external voice,
telling you that you cannot achieve something,
or it’s that internal voice of fear and of doubt
that prevents you from pursuing your passion.
These can often be more limiting factors
than the actual career world itself.
We think it’s incredibly important
to be connected to the players.
It has to guide everything we do,
every decision that we make,
it has to start with the player philosophy,
and then we sort of work backwards from there,
and we don’t always get it right,
but the closer we are with the community,
the more we’ll understand it,
like some of my favorite moments
are meeting players up close and personal
at the trade shows that we’re at,
the e-sports events that we’re at.
I’ve had so many phenomenal experiences
getting to know, getting to know our players
and I think that’s invaluable.
It’s a phenomenal resource for us as developers
to get that kind of feedback.
”
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