作者：Dan Pearson

Andres Tallos知道如何为自己设定一个挑战。在呈现自己的纸牌策略游戏时他说道：“我们是一家小型工作室，总共只有3名成员。但是我们却想要超越《炉石传说》，我也认为我们能够比他们做得更好。因为比起游戏，我们认为这更像是对于人们的一种长期服务与兴趣。”

当你与London Venture Partners团队所创造的孵化器服务的员工以及Chris Lee进行交谈时，你自然会期待着他们充满自信的表现。然而当我在与伦敦的Playhubs公司的团队进行交谈时，我还是对他们那明显的野心印象深刻。

这并不是无经验的年轻开发者所表现出的狂妄自大。Tallos以前曾是Gree在EMEA区域（欧洲，中东和非洲）的业务策略部门的总监。而现在他已然成为了真正理解业务运行的专家。这种自信并不是一种虚势，这反倒是一种真实的表现。

Tallos仍否推翻暴雪的纸牌屋还是一个难以预测的问题—-Tallos只是我所见到的Playhubs的企业家中拥有强大且可靠的业务计划中的一人，似乎他们已经和游戏概念与明确的市场融为一体了。然而他们也并非我所认为的天真的理想主义家。

之后我又见了Ryan Bousfield。他的一人VR初创企业Wolf and Wood已经创造了一款名为《A Chair in a Room》的恐怖游戏，并且其演示版本已经获得了16万的下载量，这对于一款Blusfield在业余时间所创造的游戏来说已经是不错的成绩了。Bousfield之前甚至从未亲身参与游戏制作—-在今年年初以前他还是Shoreditch一家设计机构中的创意总监。而现在他已经成为了一名全职开发者，并为Playhubs创造了另一个开发视角。

当我询问Lee有关其成员的一般年龄与经验时，他回答道：“这是一个很大的范围。我们并不想成为初创企业或独立组织的归属地。实际上作为初创企业并不是一件多酷的事。真正酷的是运行一个能够长久雇佣员工并照顾他们的赚钱业务。所以那些未通过申请的人大多都是因为他们只是为了有趣和钱才来申请的。”

“最完美的情况还是那些拥有经验，想法，家人和朋友的支持以及一定的积蓄，但却缺少投资或机构资金的人。”

“我们一些更强大的成员已经在产业中待了很长时间了。就像Andreas便在Gree待了很久。我们的高层已经为更多雇员提供了许许多多的机会，但是他也会想着，‘如果这是一个机会，那我也想去把握住它。’我期待着这里能够成为一些年轻血液的凝聚地，但同时这也要考虑到我们人脉的局限性。”

说实话，Lee的人脉非常广。作为艺电和动视的前任副总裁，并联合创建了Freestyle和Media Molecule，同时他也投资了许多家英国免费手机游戏工作室，可以说他具有非常聪明的头脑。在咨询了David Gardner后，通过添加London Vnture Partners，你便能够拥有一个能够创造出健康初创企业的孵化器与加速器。

但是在确定这一项目8个月后还是未出现较大的进展。Lee及其总经理Ted Maxwell决定退后一步，解决一些需要解决的问题。

Lee说道：“我们首先需要做的是确保那些从这里毕业的人能够获得成功。这是我们需要肩负的重任，也是我们需要传达给所有人的长远价值。”

“一直以来英国的生态系统都是基于雇佣工体系。所有的业务都是先于Facebook和手机之前便确立了，你可能认为有些内容不属于真正的业务，但是你总是需要面对基于合约的工作。你只拥有100个合约商，而他们将获得同一家公司的支付。这便是Freestyle的做法—-Media Molecule有点不同，但从效果上看Freestyle更适合雇佣一些大角色。但是很快地有人便会决定终止合约，那么这一切便都结束了。所以我们从未真正学会如何创造一项业务。我们是如何营销我们的产品？如何保护它们？如何与消费者建立关系？等等这些问题都是由其他人去解决的。”

“所以对于我们来说的最大挑战便是帮助企业家解决那些他们不知道的问题。工作室遭遇失败，或者因为一些小原因而从未真正开始运行等都不是什么大问题。不管怎样死亡也不是直接的。也许当一间拥有200个人的工作室在等待着没有希望的合同时，死亡会显得相对直接些。而在我们所处的业务模式中，死亡则是一点一点慢慢出现的。”

“也许你制定了错误的分享表，也许你获得了错误的投资，也许你雇佣了错误的人，也许你未能把握自己的知识产权，也许你选择了错误的分析工具。这些便是所有可能出现的错误决定。也许你并不知道游戏税收减免政策，也许你也不清楚苹果的支付是在月底之后60天生效。而在你遭遇了失败之后，你可能也还不知道自己是因为什么而失败的。”

“所以当你尝试着向某些人传递Playhubs的价值时，你会发现只有当这些人在经历了失败后，他们才能真正感受到这些价值。所以我们所面对的挑战在于去传达失败是一种超级简单的领悟方法。这并不是说我们能够在此得到想要的东西，而是我们希望人们能够将我们与成果和之后的发展联系在一起。”

warlords of drakendor(from gamesindustry)

Maxwell补充道：“现在的我们处于发布后的兴奋期。不过现在人们仍然是通过一些企业人脉才知道我们。在接下来的6个月里Playhubs需要不断发展。一方面，我们将接触到更多新用户，另一方面我们也将兑现自己的承诺。我们正处在一个宽限期，但这种时期并不是无限长的。”

“我们需要一些能够代表自己的产品，而不是一直利用Chris的人脉。我们的团队将开始宣传那些没有Playhubs便不能获得的成就。说实话我们在私底下真的付出了许多。”

事实上这并不只是单纯的让座。Playhubs并不是关于让某些人支付一个位置两年的费用然后再回去开发自己的会计软件。事实上这一设计更向是一个快速的转盘，即这里会不断涌入一些全新的团队。

Lee说道：“我们需要有源源不断的申请对象。我们希望人们能够在此最多待6个月—-这里并不是他们的常驻地。这并不是一间廉价的办公室。在这里你将与别人一起学习。并且你也会期待能够在某个时候学有所成。在这里获得成功的期限相对较短。”

Neon Souls的Jeremy Wilkinson在Playhubs待了几个月了，他正致力于创造《Wild Dawn》，这款关于一个女孩去拯救一个贫瘠世界的基于触屏的华丽冒险游戏。当他和团队加入这一项目时，他们拥有所有想要创造的理念，但却缺少具有实践性的业务知识。但在与“DG”进行交谈后所有的一切都发生了变化，Wilkinson认为这是“具有改革性”的变化。

他说道：“我认为我们在此经历了最有价值的旅程。这对于我们现在所创造的游戏以及工作室具有非常深刻的影响。我们对于所有内容的看法几乎发生了彻底的变化。”

“它将我从一个只是想要创造一些很酷且外表华丽的内容的独立开发者变成想要真正创造一项业务的人。并且我也开始思考如何去实现这一目标。”

“在我加入这一项目之前我未能意识到的最重要的一点是，作为独立开发者，我也能够从LVP等机构那里募集到资金去创建工作室。我认为这是更加有机的变化。这甚至将我领向了一条完全不同的道路。”

Lee说道：“这是关于理念与业务之间存在距离的有效说明。这也是我们想要尝试着向人民解释的内容。这真的具有非常大的距离。大多数人都是带着理念加入我们，而我们也尝试着确保它们在离开时能够带着对于业务的正确理解离开。并且有很多内容是人们在成为雇员后也并不了解的。如合同，IP保护，商标等等。如此看来分析工具有多么重要啊。”

对于某些团队来说，加入这个项目的好处不只是能够学习商业知识，同时也能够进行一些有效的交流。Izzy Rahman来自Vertelex Studios，这是一个由金斯密斯学院毕业的一群好朋友共同建立的一间工作室。他们的第一款手机游戏概念是围绕着Rahman认为具有极强适应性的机制所创造的创新内容。既年轻又充满活力，Rahman拥有一切符合我所认为的适合这一项目的特征，而他也具有长期发展的野心。

他曾说过：“我们想要成为一支拥有撑得了场面的产品的团队，并且能够处理一些在游戏中不常见的问题，尝试那些大型工作室因为害怕风险而不敢尝试的内容。我认为作为独立开发者的我们拥有这么做的优势。我们也想要做一些新的尝试并创造全新的游戏类型。”

因为Vertelex拥有非常新颖的概念，如果这支团队不能获得Lee和Maxwell所期待的大成功的话我便会非常惊讶。Rahman还表示他们的领导拥有无限的灵感。

“我非常惊讶。我一直以为这一切都是业务，因为这是在这里许多团队所缺少的东西。与该项目的创始人共事并交谈便已经让我们觉得值回票价了。这些人都是这一产业中的大明星。这是非常让人兴奋的事。你也能够因此获得许多自信。Playhubs是一个非常适合社交的地方，在这里所有人都充满热情。而伦敦便非常需要这样的场所。”

然而伦敦并非唯一需要这样场所的城市。很快地各种其它组织便如雨后般的春笋涌现在整个英国，这也标志着小型工作室社区与合作的新时代即将到来。

Lee解释道：“这便是Playhubs在一开始便遵循的核心原则。我们意识到这个世界上的其他人正在进行着比我们更多的交谈与分享。芬兰便做得非常好，因为在这里所有人都乐意分享。他们觉得这是再自然不过的问题了。游戏一直都在应用商店里。如果你想要看到它们，你便能看到它们。如果你想要窃取别人的理念，你便可以颠倒那些本来存在的内容。你可以掌握别人在做什么。所以还有什么担心的必要呢？”

“最终你的成功是源自团队中每个人的才能，你所创造的文化以及你去创造人们喜欢的产品的能力。这种能力是别人所偷不走的，对于你来说也是如此，有就有，没有就是没有。在英国，因为一直以来的雇佣文化使我们始终拥有这样的焦虑。如果我正在创造一款赛车游戏，并且我想要将其推销给艺电，那么我便不会选择与你讲这件事，因为你有可能也会将自己的赛车游戏推销给同个人。而在现在，这一切都变得不那么重要了。”

“我认为缺少分享我们的成功与数据的能力才是真正阻碍我们前进的元素。我们甚至会担心一些竞业禁止协议。就像如果有人要跳槽，你也不可能再做些什么。你只有努力去创建一家他们不会想要离开的工作室。我们需要机遇不同方式去处理这些问题。所以这也是我为何认为Playhubs更像是一个社区的原因，因为我们一直在努力创造一个人们能够愿意分享的地方。”

所以为什么这种情况不会自然而然地出现？英国是一个充满创造性人才与文化输出内容的地方，在这里游戏产业有效结合了技术与艺术创新。所有人都知道彼此。为什么我们没有像硅谷那样的地方呢？对于Lee来说，这仍是因为缺少业务教育。

“当你着眼于动视，Bungie，Rockstar，索尼等取得了巨大成功的公司时，你会发现这些公司的高层都是一些英国人。我一直认为我们曾经拥有过这一产业，但却松手放走了它—-从更大程度上来看是因为我们的人才大量流失到了加拿大等地方。而现在我认为人才流失情况已经得到缓解，这主要是电子游戏税收减免政策的帮助，实际上像LVP，Initial Capital和Connect Ventures等机构也在一些强大的英国公司中投了许多钱。如果能够有更多天使投资，VC以及更多策略降临游戏上就更好了。”

“但是现在的我们仍然缺少的是对于游戏商业性的真正理解。我认为这要是因为我们一直坚持认为公司是致力于服务别人。这也意味着我们缺少拥有创建持久业务的商业能力，我们并不知道如何拥有自己的IP，维持与消费者之间的关系以及把握自己的现金流。我们并不具有足够的商业经验去创建这样的业务。”

“而我们便希望能够成为这种改变的催化剂。我个人非常希望能够帮助那些正运行着自己的工作室的人。英国的优势在于许多平台所有者都是来自这里。他们之间的距离也非常近。我们不能再为自己找借口了。如果你足够优秀的话，产业便随时欢迎你在此收获成功。”

（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转发，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

“I think we owned the industry once and we let it go”

By Dan Pearson

Andres Tallos knows how to set himself a challenge. “We’re a small studio, there’s just three of us,” he tells me as he shows me his card-based strategy game. “I want to take on Hearthstone. I think we can do better. It’s all about thinking about it as a long-term service, as a hobby for people rather than just a game.”

When you talk to the residents of an incubator co-founded by the team behind London Venture Partners and Chris Lee, a man with an incredibly prescient Midas touch, you expect them to be pretty confident. Nonetheless, chatting to the teams in residence at London’s Playhubs, I’m still impressed by the obvious ambition.

This isn’t the cockiness of an inexperienced young developer talking, either. Tallos was previously the Director of business strategy for the EMEA region at Gree. He’s an established professional with a real understanding of the workings of the business. The confidence isn’t bluff, it’s genuine.

Whether he’ll manage to topple Blizzard’s house of cards is a moot point – Tallos is just one of a group of entrepreneurs I meet at Playhubs who have a strong and solid business plan in place, married to a focused game concept and a clear market. They’re not the naively idealistic graduates I was expecting.

Later, I meet Ryan Bousfield. His one man VR start-up, Wolf and Wood, has already produced horror title “A Chair in a Room”, with a demo that’s seen 160,000 downloads from the Cardboard share store, not bad for something he largely produced in his spare time. Bousfield wasn’t even originally involved in games – until earlier this year he was the creative director of a Shoreditch design agency. Now, he’s taken the plunge as a full time developer, bringing another angle to Playhubs repertoire.

“It’s quite a spectrum,” says Lee when I ask him about the general age and experience of the residents. “I would say that we have two or three applicants per person that we accept. We don’t want to be a home for start-ups, a home for indie bands, because it’s cool to be a start-up. It actually isn’t cool to be a start-up. It’s cool to run a profitable business that can hire people sustainably and look after them. So some of the people who apply don’t get through because it’s obvious that they want to do it just for fun and we want to do it for fun and profit.

“The perfect profile is two or three people who have experience who have an idea, have a shell for the company, have some money from family, friends, redundancy, whatever, but they’re not venture-backed, they haven’t got investment or institutional funding. They really initially just wanted some space, or introductions to platform holders.

“Our stronger guys have probably been in the industry a while longer. Andreas spent quite a lot of time at Gree. A super senior guy who’d been given lots of opportunities to take on more employment, but thought, ‘if there’s ever going to be one, this is my moment.’ So it ranges. I would have expected it to be something of a younger crowd, but that’s probably something to do with the limits of our networks.”

To be fair, Lee’s network is pretty extensive. An ex-VP of both EA and Activision who co-founded Freestyle and Media Molecule, as well as finding time to be an early investor in many of the UK’s leading mobile free-to-play studios, his acumen is somewhat legendary. Add London Venture Partners to the mix, with regular consultation from David Gardner, referred to with a mixture of reverence and affection as ‘DG’, and you have an incubator and accelerator which seems bound to produce bumper crops of healthy start ups.

But eight months after the foundation of the project, there hasn’t yet been a big name graduate. As Lee and his general manager Ted Maxwell concede, it’s something that needs addressing.

“The thing we need fundamentally more than anything else is a hit, someone who’s graduated from here and had a hit,” says Lee. “We need to create that. There’s a period of heavy lifting between here and now where we communicate the value of what we’re doing to people.

“The UK’s ecosystem has historically been driven by work for hire. All of the businesses that were built prior to Facebook and mobile, you could argue weren’t really businesses but umbrellas under which you were given contract work. You just had 100 contractors, really, which were being paid by the same company. That was the case with Freestyle – Media Molecule was a bit different – but effectively Freestyle was just one big work for hire behemoth. As soon as someone decided to turn the taps off, it was over. So we never really learned how to create a business. How do we market our products? Protect them? Build relationships with the consumer? Those things were all done by somebody else.

“So probably our greatest challenge is that we help solve problems that entrepreneurs don’t know exist. Studios fail, or never get started for a number of small reasons, not single big ones. Death isn’t immediate anymore. Maybe when there were 200 person studios waiting on a contract that didn’t get renewed, then death was relatively immediate. Now we’re in a different business model where death comes in small doses.

“Maybe you set up your share cap table wrong, you’ve got the wrong investment, you hired the wrong person, you didn’t protect your intellectual property, you chose the wrong analytics tools. It’s all these little bad decisions. You didn’t understand Games Tax Relief, you didn’t know Apple pays 60 days after the end of the month. All those things – until you fail, you don’t know that’s what kills you.

“So when we’re trying to communicate the value of Playhubs to somebody, because there are so many things that, even by osmosis, you will learn, it’s difficult to communicate that until someone’s experienced that failure. Our challenge has been communicating that failure is a super easy path to go down.The point isn’t that this is a hunting ground for me, or for LVP, but ultimately we do need people to associate us with success, with good graduates.”

“We’re almost at the end of the launch excitement,” adds Maxwell, sharp and engaging. “There was a splash when it was announced and that’s sort of continued through our networks, so there are people still finding out about us through our connections. The next six months is when Playhubs needs to be growing on its own. On the one hand, that’s finding and introducing ourselves to new audiences, on the other it’s delivering on promise. We’re in our grace period, but that’s not indefinite.

“We’re going to start having stuff to say for ourselves that isn’t LVP, isn’t from Chris. Our teams can start to speak for themselves about what they’ve achieved that they couldn’t have without Playhubs. We’re doing a lot beneath the surface.”

It’s not just getting bums on seats, either. Playhubs isn’t about having someone pay for a desk for two years and then go back to developing accountancy software. It’s designed to have a quick turnaround, meaning that a regular influx of new teams is vital.

“The need for a flow of people applying is significant,” says Lee. “We only want people to be here for around six months maximum – this isn’t a residence. It’s not a cheap office. It’s to get your head together, figure things out, learn as much as you can. You have to expect to fend for yourself at some point. Success is being here for a relatively short period of time.”

Jeremy Wilkinson of Neon Souls has been at Playhubs for a couple of months, working on Wild Dawn, a “beautiful touch based adventure about a girl who brings a barren world trapped in eternal night back to life.” When he and his team joined, they were, by his own admission, full of lofty ideas about what they were creating, but had little grounding in the practicalities of business. That all changed with a pitch conversion with ‘DG’ which Wilkinson calls “transformative.”

“I think that we’re probably the people who have had the most visible journey from being here,” he says with enthusiasm. “It’s had the biggest impact on what we’re doing – the game itself, the studio as a whole. It’s really been amazing, it’s transformed the way we look at everything.

“It’s changed me from a scrappy indie who just wanted to make something really cool and arty, to wanting to make a business. It’s made me think about that vision and how to achieve it.

“One of the biggest things that I didn’t realise before I joined was that as an indie I’d be able to raise really good funding from people like LVP to build a studio. I thought it would be much more scrappy and organic. This has opened my eyes to a different route.”

“It’s a good example of the distance between an idea and a business,” says Lee of Wilkinson’s project. “That’s really what we’re trying to explain to people. That’s an enormous distance. The majority of people arrive with an idea, we’re trying to make sure they leave with a business. A lot of the simple stuff shocks people, the stuff that went on but they weren’t aware of when they were an employee. Things like contracts, IP protection, trademarks. How expensive analytics tools can be.”

For some of the teams, the benefits have been as much about contacts as learning the commercial ropes. Izzy Rahman’s Vertelex Studios is a group of friends who graduated together from Goldsmiths. The concept for their first mobile game is tight, innovative and unique – based around a mechanic which Rahman sees as being hugely adaptable. Young and full of energy, Rahman fits my preconceptions about the developers I thought I’d find here much more closely, but he’s not short on long term ambitions either.

“We want to be the team that’s known for having the balls to go out there and address the issues that aren’t normally addressed in games, delivering experiences that the big studios might be a bit afraid of because they’re risky,” he says, convincingly. “I think as indies we have that privilege. We use the phrase avant garde a lot. We want to do new things and create a whole new genre.”

Given the freshness of Vertelex’s concept, I’d be surprised if the team didn’t turn out to be one of the big successes that Lee and Maxwell are so keen on. Rahman says that the leadership has been nothing short of inspiring.

“I was quite surprised, I thought it would be all business, because that’s something that a lot of the teams are actually lacking here. Working and speaking with the founders of this place is worth the entrance fee alone. These guys are pretty much the pop stars of the industry. When it actually hits you that you’re working some of the first guys who recognised Supercell…It’s really exciting. It gives you a lot of confidence. Playhubs is an incredible place to network, everyone is so passionate. London needs something like this.”

London isn’t the only city to come to this conclusion. Various other collectives have sprung up around the country, signifying a new era of community and collaboration amongst small studios. For Lee, it couldn’t have come soon enough.

“This was the core principle of Playhubs at the very beginning,” he explains. “We realised that everyone else in the world was talking more, sharing more, than we were. Finland is doing phenomenally well because everyone is willing to share. They see no issue with that. Games are on the app store. If you want to look at them, you can. You can reverse engineer what’s there if you really want to steal ideas. You can figure out what they’re making. So why worry about it?

“Ultimately your success comes from your talent as a group of individuals, the culture you create and your ability to create a product that people love. That can’t be stolen, you’ve either got it or you haven’t. In the UK we’ve built up this anxiety, partly, I think, because of that work for hire culture. If I’m building a racing game and I want to pitch it to EA, it’s probably not a good idea to talk to you about your racing game because you’re probably pitching to the same people. So I think that’s where it comes from. But it’s no longer relevant. We still keep hold of it, but it doesn’t matter anymore.

“That lack of ability to really share our successes and our data and our metrics… I think that’s really holding us back. We even worry about non-solicits and non-competes…If someone wants to move, there’s nothing you can do about it, they’ll move. You just need to build a studio they won’t dream of leaving. We need to deal with these problems in different ways. So that’s why I think of Playhubs more as a community, because we’re trying to build somewhere that people share.”

So why hasn’t this happened organically? The UK is a powerhouse of creative talent and cultural exports, the games industry a perfect marriage of technical and artistic innovation. Everyone knows everyone else. Why don’t we have our Silicon Valley? For Lee, it’s still about the business education.

“You look at the companies that have become tremendously successful, Activision, Bungie, Rockstar, Sony, it’s all Brits at the top of those companies. I think we owned the industry once and we let it go – to a large extent because of the brain drain to places like Canada. I think that the brain drain has stopped, I think things like the videogames tax relief has helped a lot, as has the fact that there are people like LVP and Initial Capital and Connect Ventures putting money into strong UK companies, although there could be more capital available. It’d be nice if there were more angels, VCs, even more strategics looking at games.

“But what we still lack is this true understanding of the commerciality of games, the business of games. I think that’s inherent in the fact that we’ve built companies predominantly as servants to others, historically. That’s meant that our commercial ability to build a sustainable business over time, that owns its own IP, that owns its relationship with the consumer, owns its cash flow, can survive alone, that’s lacking. We don’t have the commercial calibre of experience to build those businesses at a volume I’d like us to.

“We want to be a catalyst of that change. I personally want to help individuals who are running studios to become better at that. All the ingredients exist. The beauty of the UK is that the platform holders are all here. They’re all within ten minutes walk. We shouldn’t have any more excuses. We’ve had too many. If you’re good enough, then the industry is welcoming enough for you to be successful.”（source：gamesindustry）