What Else Game Devs Do, with Masao Kobayashi

Masao Kobayashi co-founded the indie studio Cut to Bits after about 15 years at Ubisoft, where he worked in a wide range of roles that often redounded to some form of project management and/or being a liaison between North American and Japanese teams and companies. That, and community management about as early as that became a thing, during which time (fun fact) he may have made the first page about a videogame in the history of Facebook. Here he talks a bit about all of that, but just as much about the sheer surreality of late stage capitalism, with some perhaps-inevitable attention to the hypebeastly griftstravaganza that is the current NFT bubble—as well as the (sometimes only magically) less insane world of investors and studio structures. You can learn more about Cut to Bits on their website. You can find the What Else Do You Do? podcast where pods get cast. Also, you can follow Masao (and Cut to Bits) on Twitter. Oh, and you can watch Masao open bottles with things other than bottle openers on his TikTok. ——— • If you're looking for an explanation of gold bricking (and other olde-timey scams) and of how they get run in the context of NFTs, this thread is a good place to start. • As far as I can verify, Grand Theft Auto V cost about $265 million to make and market, and has now brought in more than $6 billion in revenue. If it's not both the most expensive and the most profitable game of all time, then it certainly does occupy a high spot on both of those lists. ——— "All The People Say (Season 4)" by Carpe Demon. "Bronzeville Jump" and "The Old Blues" by The Three Bits of Rhythm. Logo by Aaron Perry-Zucker, using Icons by by Llisole, Dávid Gladiš, Atif Arshad, Daniel Nochta, Mike Rowe, Jakub Čaja, Raji Purcell and IconsGhost from the Noun Project.