PAX Online 2020 - Survival of the Fittest w/ Dean Hall & Brian Hicks

Who's this? Who's this dude with the jacket? You go cover back in here, okay. Shut all the doors and keep an eye on them and the back here.

Yeah, that's right, take your jacket off, that's real helpful. Whoa, who's that? Whoa!

No, you just got our friend. What, he doesn't even have a frozen man?

At least announce it.

Greetings everyone, we're here for the PAX Online panel 'Survival of the Fittest' to talk the origins, present, and future of the survival drama with two titans of the genre that probably don't need the introduction, but we'll do one anyway. Brian Hicks and Dean Hall.

I'm Dean Hall, otherwise known as Rocket. I made the DayZ mod and sold it to Bohemia, then worked with Bohemia to deliver the standalone. I left there somewhat notoriously and set up a studio called Rocket Werks, and we're trying to apply all the lessons we learned in this new video game, Icarus, that Brian's our EP on.

Cool. So we might as well start at the beginning. How did the DayZ mod come about in the first place?

I was in the army. I'd been in the industry previously. I actually got my start making aircraft for a flight simulator, so it's kind of cool that flight simulator is sort of in again. I ended up working at a studio in Wellington here in New Zealand as a producer, but I actually got out of that and went back into the military. While I was in the military, I'd been working on this training tool for soldiers that ended up becoming the DayZ mod. I actually released it while I was working at Bohemia on Arma 3, and I kind of flipped over and changed at that point and focused on DayZ.

Sure. About you, Brian, what were you doing at this point?

Yeah, and I think it was CH Kilroy's video. Basically, I'd been preparing this mod. I talked with some of the people at Shape Tech as I was working on Arma 3. Dyslexi is a very famous member of the Arma community, and he's ex-military as I am, and he's actually Brian's. So I'd been talking to him about Arma 3, and I was like, 'Hey, there's this mod I've been working on.' I was employed at Bohemia as the multiplayer designer, but the multiplayer wasn't actually working. So I'd been wanting to look into this large-scale multiplayer system that I'd worked on previously in my own time. So I was looking at applying that in Arma 3. I talked to Dyslexi and said, 'Hey, you guys want to try out something fun?' I'd been working on this mod. Actually, how I released it is I made a server name. This is before the Chrome thing. I made a server name and I put the MediaFire file because MediaFire was a thing back then. I just said 'DayZ Zombie Survival' and then I put the MediaFire link in it. I remember there was a moment when some random person joined it. Someone went into their browser, alt-tabbed out, had to type a MediaFire link and download it, joining not knowing whatever this is at all, and they played for like an hour and then died and left. So I wonder who that person is. There's someone out there who is that first one. Then basically that weekend we played with Shaktak a full server, and I think it was at that point I was like, 'This is going to be big.' But we really didn't have any idea how big, and I think that was something that really hurt us in the long run. Every time we make a plan, in a few days we kind of have to throw it up and rip it out. For a start, with Mark Ceo, awesome guy, we had this plan that was to make a DLC for Arma 3 based on it, but that was when there were like 5,000 concurrents or something. By the end of the week it was like 50,000. It got so big that Gamespy, which again was the thing back then, they actually turned off authentication which broke the game at like midnight. I remember raging on LinkedIn trying to get them to turn it back on. So Gamespy had to turn on their whole system, but we broke everything. We broke Steam's auth at one point. So it really spiraled out of control pretty fast, and that means that all the plans we were making, we had to rip up the plan and start again. I think that was one of the big challenges we faced very early on.

So now, sort of eight or nine years later, I think a lot of players have a pretty clear idea of what makes up a survival game. The genre eventually defined itself. Do you feel like you went in trying to make that from the get-go, or was that just a result of a lot of iteration through the DayZ mod stages to get to that?

Yeah, well, it was. And look, honestly, the time of iterating on the DayZ mod was probably one of the funnest times in the industry for me because there was this real direct engagement with the community. I was talking directly with people, and that was how I'd run my little gaming group called UO. This group of ex-military people, I would make mods for them and I'd talk directly with them, and people would give me ideas. I felt like I was quite good at figuring out what was possible and working it in. I'm very pragmatic. And it was kind of that, but exponentially bigger, and I really enjoyed that engagement. I think early on we just had this awesome rapport with the community. Any members of the community coming in like Brian. I remember when I met Brian Hicks actually, it was Prime, and it was a whole bunch of him and a whole bunch of other people in streamers who ended up becoming super famous. We went to dinner and it was awesome. That was something that I just found super enjoyable, and I haven't really ever been able to get since. The latter part of the DayZ side, it all turned quite toxic community-wise, but that early phase of the mod I think was great. And I think that was a reflection of how the mod was approached: iterative, starting with a very straightforward pillar and holding on to those gameplay pillars. When we went into the standalone originally, I was going to follow that model. I sat down, started planning out what were the things that made DayZ mod tick, how could we dial in on those. It was all looking good, sitting down, typing it all up, and then E3 happened and a bunch of other things like that, and I just became terrified that we were going to miss our chance. So I kind of threw all that planning out and just started coding. And that was the worst mistake really. I think that was the big one: not spending the time to sit down and just analyze what made the DayZ mod tick, how could we capitalize on that. The standalone, it's a real teachable moment for everyone to look at that.

I was going to ask you about that. How did the fact that it ended up getting released, even though it sounded like you did have to rush them through at the end, what are sort of the key lessons that you took from that experience?

Well, I think the big one is really being clear about what your product is. I think that's super important with survival games. What are the pillars of the game, the experience, the feeling that you're trying to get through? I think the reason a lot of people really like the mod is even though it's janky and it's got all these problems with it, it really brought through those feelings. It was quite simple in that aspect. There were just so many moments that people had, and everybody has their DayZ mod story. Without having that clear picture of what you're trying to achieve, you can kind of lose yourself. And that was what happened with DayZ standalone. I became obsessed with solving modding, but actually I think in hindsight, solving modding via communities would be better. Brian, you have a lot of experience with GTA RP communities and stuff like that. Those role-playing servers, even Minecraft servers, they manage that kind of stuff through whitelisting, blacklisting, stuff like that. So managing giving the community tools to manage anti-social behavior, I think is more effective.

So you talked about how important community was in helping develop the game and evolve it. What do you think it was about survival games that made those communities grow so much in the first place? What sort of drew people and made them commit that much to a game?

I guess that kind of gets into something that I think a lot of people don't realize. If you look at that evolution, PewDiePie did a video on actually the evolution from DayZ through to PUBG and not to Fortnite, but I think that I see survival as this kind of river, there's a genre. Or at least a recent genre anyway. And if you look at it, it's not hard and fast, but I definitely think that PvP branch of the river through PUBG, through battle royale and events like Survivor Games, which was which Brian Stewart and then through to Fortnite, that really took the feelings and the emotions that you get from games like DayZ but it really packaged them very well in a way that you could describe to people exactly what their experience was going to be. And I think that's what really resonated with people with PUBG. Not only did Brendan capture that, but also iterated on it in a really great way. And I think that's what Survivor Games did too, although they were kind of hampered usually with me not having the time to give them access to the code, which I said I wouldn't, stuff like that to support. It was definitely an experience trying to build the idea around Survivor Games.

Yeah, I mean, it's fascinating to look back at some of the competitors we had in the Survivor Games. I mean, even down to the Hunger Games, folks like Lyric, sure he was big on Twitch at the time, but the definition of big on Twitch at that time is tiny nowadays. You got Lyric and Summit and people that have moved on like Pudding and Anthony Kongphan and Syndicate, Sacriel. All these people managed to come together, and I suppose you could say it almost led to people in that community of streamers and moderators around those streams getting to know each other, and friendships were made and communities were built. It was just an exciting time.

There were people that would join random DayZ mod servers around summer 2012 with the name 'Rocket Two Guns' just to try and trick the administrators of that server to either shut it off or give them stuff or convince them they were gonna get banned. You had impersonators running around.

Yeah, so I think that being there at that moment when it starts is very cool. I think it's something I really enjoy about the game community, but definitely got very complicated with the standalone. And I think that was our big question is not rushing, which is hopefully what we've done. Stick to what works.

So one thing about both Survivor Games in general that we've talked a lot about and battle royale more recently, all of the big success stories, the Arks, the Rust, they've all sort of come from the DayZ, the PUBG, that all come from those smaller indie community roots. And there haven't been so many successful attempts at bankrolling a big one of those games and really getting off the ground. Have you ever thought about how you would approach that given starting from a stronger financial position and having the runway and the time to?

Yeah, I mean, at the studio, you guys know we talk a lot about the reasons we do things being written in blood. And that's kind of alluding to, I mean, having an aviation military background, aviation safety is written in blood. The reason we have rounded edges on the windows is because of cracks appearing and the framework of people dying as a result. So the reasons that things happen in the aircraft it's very deliberate, and it's kind of the same for us with their development processes. We've tried stuff, and often it's because of the failure we've tried to learn that lesson and simply let's not do it that way. So looking back at what happened with DayZ, it wasn't just about throwing money at the problem. A lot of it was about getting the best people, people who had experience. And I talked about that sort of survival game thousand-yard stare. Adam, one of our designers, was a designer on Miscreated. And he just brings huge value to the team because he's been through the trenches and he's got that. He knows it's not just a problem of imagination, it's not about having good ideas, it's about how those ideas can get delivered and iterated on, most importantly iterated on. And that's where we talk about at the studio and now with Icarus, games are played not made. Every Thursday we do our internal playtest, and it's about playing the game and we look at it and we really just cut through and say, 'Is this mechanic fun? Is this mechanic delivering the experience we want?' And just brutal honesty with it. And I think that's been a critical lesson and part of our process. And I think if you look at DayZ mod, that was what was fun about it. That was what was magical to people about it. And that was when the best stuff happened. And it was when we lost all that and got caught up in our own nonsense, I think we got punished by the community for it. And I think that is kind of where with the survival genre, particularly that other branch of the river, so we've talked about PvP. And I think that if you look at the evolution through PUBG and Fortnite, it makes sense, it's awesome. But I feel like PvE hasn't been looked at the same. So that player versus environment stuff just hasn't had the same treatment. That's what we wanted to do with Icarus was actually go through and really just give real treatment to those core survival mechanics. And that's been perhaps my biggest frustration with the genre, trying to deal with that. And I know why we haven't as an industry, because it's hard. It's a different way of making games. It really is focused on the mechanics. You don't have things that can pull you through. It's not about pulling it through with a great story or a good cutscene. It really comes down to those mechanics, and that's very expensive. As we found, having to get really good people. When we started out with that, it was really clean slate with the studio on, 'Hey, let's look at a real way that we can deliver this.' We went out and got the best producers I've ever worked with for sure, which Brian is one of them. And we got a producer, Bobby, who I worked with 10 years ago on Clone Wars, which I got removed from as a credit. We work with really good people. A number of very senior people came across from Grinding Gear Games who work on Path of Exile, and they've just been incredible to work with. Particularly Ben Carnell, he actually wrote a book on Unreal Engine game development. And I remember you told me when I first briefed about the idea of Icarus, you actually told me I needed to talk to this person. A number of people had said that. I remember sitting down with them here in Auckland, and within five minutes I was like, 'This is the person to make this game with us.' He just really got what we were trying to do, that feeling. He was sort of quoting the pillars that we'd come up with back to me. And that was a cool experience. And I think that looking at what DayZ was, where game dev tools are, and now I would approach it completely differently. But I'm just really enjoying working with such awesome people. And you can probably sit here talking for ages about just that.

I think as well, we learned that it's not just about having a group of people who are super passionate about survival games. So if you look at that, some of our people are just professionals. Maybe survival games aren't their bread and butter, but that's actually good because we have a group of people who are kind of the control group to just sort of test and balance our assumptions. And that's really been our process. We'll come up with, we'll go through, we'll look at the games that are out there and we'll say what's best in class for what we're trying to do here, and then we'll try it. And we've been able to work really closely with Epic, who have been fantastic. They actually have direct access to our source and are telling us, 'Hey, you should use this like that.' Just being able to have that level of engagement and support from an engine developer is just incredible and has allowed us to just move so quickly towards it. You can kind of feel Epic's passion around survival games as well, which has just been fantastic. And all that together means that we've really been able to focus in on what I think the survival genre is missing, which is the iteration on the core survival mechanics. Simple things: how do you chop down a tree, how does it feel, how do you mine voxels? And I think there's so many cool examples that you can look at individually. I really like playing Deep Rock Galactic. It's got a really cool feel to how you mine. So we'd look at games like that, we'd be like, 'We really like how that works. How can we take that and apply it in the context of what we're making?' Now we're really trying to recreate that first night in Minecraft. And on Brian's point about feelings, when you think about it, I don't know what you guys think, I can remember mine. I spawn in and people tell me what's happening and I'm like, 'Oh my god.' And night comes, you just dig a hole and you just all sit in the hole. All you've done is remove a few blocks and sit in a hole, cover it up again, and you're like, 'Oh my god, best game ever.' When you think about it, there's not much involved in that. It's really just all about feelings. And so much of it is what you created. And it's hard to do that. And we talk a lot about 'Thanks, I hate it.' That's been a huge lesson for us, which is basically we'll make an assumption, we'll say, 'Right, we're going to do this.' We'll get the art made for it, we'll have the programmers develop it, but we all recognize that it might end up being like, 'Thank you, you have done everything we've asked, you've done perfectly, you've done it great, but we hate it. It's terrible.' And there's a bit of a meme in the company, but I think it really works for us because it really acknowledges that the measure of what we do is not by just achieving what we said we're going to do. That's the end result of the feeling. It's the Thursday playtest. And I hope that when people see the game, they'll see that. I think it makes that criticism less personal as well. It's just, yeah, if it's something that's comical, 'Stinks, I hate it.' It's directed purely at the result.

So when you left DayZ, I think it was in a Eurogamer interview you commented that you felt the game was fundamentally flawed. Do you want to drill into that at all? What were the things you identify?

Yeah, I mean, I think a big part of growing as a developer, even in any area of work or even just in your personal life, I find is being able to go through what you've done and do this kind of after-action report and actually go through and pull it apart. I think being able to be a critic of yourself is super important in terms of being able to avoid repeating the past mistakes. In some cases for me, repeating them twice, but eventually you learn. I definitely remember it was back when we were first showing DayZ standalone at E3. E3 is kind of this industry, well was this industry expo, and so it's not interesting people, and we all like to sort of pat ourselves on the back a lot. And you see this a lot with a big game that's coming out, everyone's like, 'It's going to be amazing,' and then it flops. And so everybody just loved to love DayZ. And I remember sort of my head wondering, but you could get swept up with it. So everyone's like, 'Yeah, this is going to be amazing, it's huge.' And everybody wanted to come see it. And I'd have Ubisoft coming over and inviting me into secret viewings of their products, and it was all very cool and exciting. But then it was moving to Gamescom, and Gamescom was a consumer show. So a few months later, we showed the game off. That was when I started to get the feeling of the decisions that I had made, how they had actually affected the game. And the lack of focus on the pillars of the project, or the ability for us to have actually gestated those pillars of the mod, instead focusing on a very reactionary approach of development, had come through and affected us. And the consumers, they liked the game, and I think we were talking before that there's a bit of a resurgence for DayZ. It's not that people don't like the game, but there were fundamental decisions made that limited where we could go with it. And they were made with the best of intentions, but in hindsight they were the wrong decisions. And that's what I believe. So it was at that Gamescom when I realized that the decisions we've made and the reactionary approach that I had taken had negatively affected the potential of what we could do with the game. And that's hard. It's really hard to realize that. And I put like another year into it directly after that. It's very hard, but you have to do that process if you want to get better. You have to be able to do that. And it was walking back across that bridge at Cologne, I think it has like locks on it and stuff. I was walking back across that bridge and I did the thought experiment in my head of, 'What if we had learned those lessons and what would it look like?' And that was the first time that I had the idea for Icarus. And I went back to my hotel room and I just wrote pages and pages. Now, the problem was I identified there were a few key parts of the concept that didn't work, particularly the ability to scale. There was a big one. I didn't want to touch survival again unless I could guarantee people playing the game, the game could scale with the experience. I think this is the great filter, the big trap for survival games. You see this with damn near every survival game. It's very easy to get the first few steps out of the way, but once you've done that, eventually the game starts scaling. Both from a scale in terms of the inflation effects of your economy itself and the game, so you're continually amassing stuff, as well as the technical impact with now the server has to calculate all that stuff. That's where things fall over.

Yeah, and I think you have to be very sure about what you want to do if you're going to do that. And so we took the time with Icarus to sit down and say, 'What is this game? What are the pillars? What are we trying to deliver?' And I mean, we could talk about that for a long time, but for me the big takeaway for people watching is the idea of Icarus is to go back to those core survival mechanics. Simple things: how do you chop down trees, how do you mine minerals, and just that sense of building a cabin and surviving. That is survival. That's why I climb mountains, so I go ski in Antarctica. Surviving can be really thrilling. And you talked about feelings before and how battle royale survival is thrilling and it's packaged well. We wanted to do the same treatment but to PvE. And I don't think that anyone has really gone and done that treatment. I think Ark did a really good job, but it's quite old now. And so we wanted to go back in and actually rethink that. And just being able to do that with these really experienced people from places like Grinding Gear Games, it's just been fantastic.

Do you feel like now that you're working in a company of your own, Dean, and you have that control, do you feel like that's going to be able to open up your options a lot more through development in terms of taking feedback and implementing it without being beholden to a publisher or other investors?

Yeah, look, I mean, actually it's super hard to get right. I talked before about design by constraints, and I actually believe design by constraints can really help you. In a situation like making the DayZ mod, you get given the constraints. You don't have, you can't change the engine. When you don't have that, you have to figure them out yourself. And I guess it started with how we approached development. I sat down with the team when I took lead and said, 'I want to make this game using the engine. I don't want to work against the engine. I don't want to work against the physics engine. I don't want to work against any part of it. I want to work with it. If we have to make our trains in the grain in the game, let's make them by hand.' What happened was when we started attaching, you talked about iron sharpens iron, when we started attaching really good people to the project, really good people started joining the project. We've got Ash who did all the UI for Path of Exile. And I remember, survival games have notoriously bad UI. And I was shocked when I played Ark and they'd taken my very rudimentary icons in the bottom side, and I was like, 'I thought that was a bad idea when I thought like 20 people were going to play the game, you know, but it works.' And that's kind of the beauty of Ark really. They just took stuff and they just made it work. But then working with Ash, suddenly it's like instead of we're just doing functional UI, it's like, 'Oh my god.' Jake, a very senior programmer from Path of Exile, he came in with this clear idea in his head about how to approach inventory. So you have this awesome group of people who've been working together for ages, fresh into a new idea that's very clear and specific aim, and it's just like gives you goosebumps just watching them iterate. And I stepped back. Previously in projects, I would often code directly. And if I was having a bad day, I'd just bury myself and code. With this project, we said no. I'm not allowed to get involved in that. I think that's been really good. My cog in the machine has to play with holding us accountable to delivering on the pillars, to delivering the feelings we want, and being able to say that 'Thanks, I hate it.' That's my role. I don't get to hide away coding because I don't want to do what I want to do in that day. It's a very cathartic experience now that I think of it. When you're presented with a problem in script and code, it's very, it's almost binary. It's going to work or it's not. That's the problem you have to focus on. Whereas with these larger, managing the project, managing the company, some of those solutions don't come around in a day of reading other examples and Stack Overflow or bashing your head against a problem, rubber ducking. So it's a long path and it's a difficult one to take.

So DayZ and Survivor Games and stuff were coming up at a time when Twitch was fairly new as well and has continued to grow monumentally since. Did you ever see sort of Twitch and online streaming getting to that point?

So back to Icarus. You were saying that you have taken a hands-off approach to coding and you're just sort of playing the game and experiencing it and then commenting on it, making decisions based on that. Is this you making your perfect game?

No, it's come up in a pitch meeting once. No, it's not. It's not about that. It's about finding what works for this game. And maybe this is getting old, but the thing that sort of attracts me most to it is how achievable it is. We're taking a bunch of things that have been done before, but we're putting them together in a way they haven't. And I think from a technical perspective, that really interests me. Because if you look at the individual parts of it, they're all very possible. And the work that's being done on how we approach voxels and stuff has been amazing because we've been setting this benchmark here, then a team exceeds it. And you very watch you don't become victims of your own success there and end up going too far and causing yourself issues. But it's been fantastic to see that process. But there's not been a process of 'let's make the dream, shove everything in game.' No, that's not what it is. We are looking at the best in class for survival games, but trying to keep front and center and ahead what are we trying to do. Okay, the most important thing we're doing is give you that recreatable first night in Minecraft, give you that experience of survive, building a cabin, surviving, but then giving you that broader longer-term view to give you a reason to keep playing, reliving that experience. And I think it's going to be the first time that the survival PvE genre has seen that level of treatment.

Which probably leads me to a good question about hype. So between game devs and the community and expectations and hype, you two are probably better poised than a lot to comment on managing those expectations and being transparent in a way to move forward when things aren't aligning the way you hoped they were.

I mean, between us and Sean Murray, we've all got our battle scars for that one. Yeah, look, I mean, I think that when someone tells you something, that comes with responsibility. So it's kind of challenging because if you want true, honest, genuine engagement with people, and I think if you look at Twitch, if you look at YouTube, and social media in general, that's the most valuable thing is being able to have genuine engagement with the community. And that comes with responsibility because if you're going to genuinely go out there to the community and tell them what's going on, they need to be prepared to accept the reality of which is that you might change. A good example of a game I've been playing a lot of in early access, and a while ago on Twitter I said it was the best example for me, was a game called Stormworks, which I absolutely adore. And it's going 1.0 very soon, people should pick it up, fantastic game. And I've just so enjoyed their process of going through early access. They're just an amazing team and they've had a level of engagement and they've been really prepared to make the tough calls. They will make decisions as part of their game to remove parts. And the Project Zomboid team have been the same. They're making the bold calls. Gary made super bold calls with Rust to go back in and redo everything. And that's what's awesome about Gary. He makes these really, he decides something and he does them. And I think that's a really good attribute in a leader to do that. And he's certainly been a big career inspiration for me about how to approach things and stuff like that. So I think that's a big part of it for me. Being able to have that genuine relationship with the community, you also need to sort of temper that with, well, the community is going to understand and be able to appreciate what I'm telling them. I'm going to be pragmatic and honest. And there was a lot of whiplash from times where I would write things up and I would be too honest and blunt. 'You're not going to get this or this, this is why.' And to a degree, people do want some excitement. They do need a little bit of Dean's energy in that. I think it's been a lot of balancing and continues to be for me to this day. And I am very confident saying going into Icarus that the both of us and the extremes that we both went have found, I think, a more middle ground, balanced approach. We're both very excited and interested again in engaging directly with the community. Much like when you're writing mods and dealing with the mind, very excited about directly relating to them, getting feedback, iterating off of that. And I don't think either of us are going to be up on stage and 'it has to be out by the end of the year' again. I mean, that statement was true, but it didn't have to be. I didn't have to achieve what we wanted it had to be, and we failed. And I think that being able to recognize when you fail at something is really important. And I think that's maybe the nuance that a lot of people miss.

Yeah, I would definitely say, not to run this question on too much, but where in the past I might get super excited about an upcoming feature or some new content that is down the pipe, more so today I'm definitely getting my approach is to more get excited about the feelings that I know I already have. Going again and talking about the stuff with that playtest, it's a, I'm excited about that feeling. And you really don't have to worry about that smashing in your face nearly as much as finding out that an engineer massively underestimated their work.

So I mean, now we're talking about it, Chris. It got announced at the PC Game Show three months ago, four months ago. Wow. How's it tracking?

Yeah, so it was, we sort of debated whether we were going to do that, but I think it was good for us to get out there and good for the team as well. So much of the buzz of making games and part of it, it's not really so much about the money, it's definitely about the being part. I love releasing stuff. I go crazy. It's definitely, I went completely crazy having to apologize to some people pretty much every time I release the game. But yeah, it's a huge emotional thing no matter what the game is. You go through this moment. And I think you were saying Brendan went through this when he released PUBG, you wonder whether anyone's going to buy it at all. I remember with DayZ standalone, I had that fear. I was like, 'What if nobody, not even one person buys it?' But basically, it's been tracking really well. We've stuck to our milestones. And we're challenging and testing those assumptions and staying true to the pillars of the game. And we've got to that point where we're running around a variety of biomes, trying to make the binds look and feel cool, introduce the tension, and again, why and trying to survive. And that emotion, and I think we're delivering through on that.

So where can people go to find out more about it?

So we're really trying to pick up that community engagement. The best place for people to go for now is surviveicarus.com. It has links to the Discord, the usual things like Instagram and stuff like that. But we are really hoping to open up the development. We really want to focus on showing people what we have, so getting hyped about what's there, not getting hyped about what's to come. And I think that's helpful for us as well as the community. It's a lot of fun as well. I think some of my fondest memories of releasing a game with you was just playing on stream. And I love talking about it with people afterwards. And that was the real fun part of Stationeers for me, is actually we've got this amazing relationship with the community. They go in and tell us directly in the code what needs to be fixed. And I'd love to see if we can do that at a higher level. Stationeers is a small niche game, so we have friendships with a lot of the key people in the community. We play video games, hang out on Discord with them. That was the best part of DayZ the mod. I'd love to see us be able to do that again with the survival genre. We're just so passionate about it. So much of my time is spent playing and living it, and even in my real life and things I do in real life. So being able to return to that and do it with the community would be fantastic.

Cool. Well, thanks very much for your time. I can't wait to see what comes next in the survival genre and what comes up with Icarus.