Reading “Adventures of the Screen Trade” – Parallels between mobile games and the movie business

Overview of the book

“Adventures of the Screen Trade” is a great book written by screenwriter William Goldman in the early 80s. This book is mentioned in another awesome book: “That Will Never Work” by Marc Randolph (co-founder of Netflix).

Goldman’s book is part essay on the movie industry, part stories about the chaotic, unpredictable and sometimes ego-driven people that make the movie business work. I highly recommend it for anybody who loves movies, the business of entertainment, and stories about the erratic lives of studio executives, movie stars, directors and countless others that are trying to juggle the realities of making a picture come to life. It’s a fun and pleasant book.

The reason Randolph mentions “Adventures of the Screen Trade” is because it shows how elusive success is, and how little people in the movie business can actually control the business outcome of their efforts. “Nobody knows anything” is the key sentence Randolph takes away from the book. And in a sense that also seems to apply to the business of mobile games (and, according to Randolph, to Netflix). On my end another quote resonated quite a bit

No one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess – and, if you’re lucky, an educated one (…) David Picker, a fine studio executive for many years, once said something to this effect: ‘If I had said yes to all the projects I turned down, and no to all the ones I took, it would have worked out about the same’

That quote might bring a smile to anyone who has ever tried to make a successful mobile game. And that’s because despite all our best efforts and plans, success ultimately remains out of our hands. Of course you need to follow best practices, have a tight economy, the meta systems that will drive mid and long-term retention, etc. Those are all necessary conditions for success. But those aren’t enough (i.e. sufficient). Ultimately the audience will determine if a game – or movie – will be successful. In other words if it has that je ne sais quoi that resonates with the current Zeitgeist and drives the audience to want to engage with it.

Mobile games – more entertainment than tech

Mobile games do have a lot in common with the tech world. A few things come to mind. First, mobile games are a software product: lines of code – and in that respect part of the tech ecosystem. When looking at production costs that means 99% of the costs are people-related. Compare that with movies. In the movie business you have huge costs for location, transportation, props, costume, etc. The star system also means one individual gets a huge chunk of the business (and profits, depending on the contract they signed). On top of that there is a lot of “idle pay”. While you’re waiting for a star to come out of its trailer, for the weather to clear up for the perfect shot, or clearance from the execs above, you have to pay for all the staff around the shooting that are idle. 

Another big difference between movies and mobile games comes from distribution and competition. There are few studios and a handful of movies coming out any given year. In mobile games distribution is open to anybody, and there are millions of new mobile games released each year. And the list of differences could go on and on.

Despite all that, one big takeaway for me reading Goldman’s book is that making a mobile game is probably closer to movies than tech. Mobile games are part of the entertainment business and should be treated as such. For 2 reasons. 1) Entertainment is not about functionality. And 2) games are content. And these 2 points have clear implications when it comes to the risks and uncertainties of making a game, and the best way to achieve it.

There is no inherent need or functionality associated with entertainment. A) people engage with entertainment when they have free time. Aside from a few individual exceptions, people don’t reorder their lives around TV schedules (if that’s still a thing) or the weekly live ops you run on your game. They engage with entertainment when they are not taken by their daily obligations. That’s what I meant by rethinking the notion of game as service. So the functionality part is not really there. Candy Crush and Bingo Blitz don’t fulfill a different product-market fit. Just like a comedy and an action movie are not fundamentally about different needs (or an action movie starring Schwarzenegger vs. Stallone). Preferences, trends and fads for sure. Needs and functionality, no.

And that brings us to the second point. The main product here is mobile phones and their ability to  deliver gaming experiences. Content (which games are) do not address different product-market fit. They populate a library for users to choose from. In both movies and mobile games, individual pieces of content don’t solve fundamentally different user needs. They’re different flavors built on the same underlying technological medium. The real “fit” is at the technology level: mobile phones enabling quick, bite-sized entertainment. 

What does that mean: pour your heart out and optimize failure

I have to agree with Goldman. Nobody knows how to make a hit mobile game. This is not saying you should just freestyle things and yolo whatever. Again, best practices in terms of systems, balancing, etc. are necessary for sustainable success. The same goes for UA. But a successful mobile game is a game people get excited about. So having a good sense of the times and current trends is definitely something that helps. But there are no real ways to derisk things. So that to me means 2 things. First, you have to give it your all. Have true, strong convictions, and see them through. Second, you definitely should optimize your production pipeline. But there is better ROI to try to optimize the cost of (inevitable and frequent) failure than slightly increase your hit rate. You can (and should) systematize failure. It’s much harder – maybe even elusive – to try to systematize success. 

To make a hit you need to give it your best and hope it lands with the public. You can’t do better than your best. That’s why that’s definitely what you should strive for. Having a coherent vision, a reason and purpose for your features, art is the way to be successful. There are few cases that come to mind of games that have been sustainably successful by frankensteining a bunch of different and incoherent parts. 

Second, if you want to build a successful business, you need to optimize your failures. Not matter how hard you try you will fail more often than you succeed. Say 99% of attempts fail. You can do all you can to increase that 1% success rate to 2 or 3%. But chances are there will be a greater ROI if you reduce the time and cost of those 99% of failures you will produce. So being quick to discard failures, and finding cheap ways to validate are critical to stay in business and give you as many shots on goal as possible to score that hit.

So pour your heart into each swing, but build a machine that lets you swing again and again. In entertainment, nobody knows anything. Except that you’ll need more than one shot.