TDC #04: From Shark Tank to Steam with Lior Hadashian

Amit Netanel (00:00)
your brain is the product.

Yuri Sokolov (00:00)
it.

Lior Hadashian (00:01)
I forgot all our pitches.

Yuri Sokolov (00:03)
let me be a smart ass for once.

Amit Netanel (00:05)
That guy managed to lose someone else's money

Lior Hadashian (00:09)
did we just say no

Amit Netanel (00:10)
You

Yuri Sokolov (00:17)
So guys, have you played anything recently?

Lior Hadashian (00:19)
Unity engine is the game

Yuri Sokolov (00:22)
It's a game, I would say it's a game. The amount of, you know, the curse words that you hear behind the scenes is probably something close to, I don't know, souls-like game.

Amit Netanel (00:34)
Definitely. If you lose your progress, you have to regain it.

Lior Hadashian (00:39)
No, but seriously, I think I just play with friends right now, Battlefield 6 This is our go-to to relax, like I don't know if you call it relax, but for me it's putting out all the stress, like getting into the field one hour, two hours, like every few days This is my go-to right now

Amit Netanel (00:45)
Hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (00:58)
Yeah, for me shooters are no go and I remember when my kid was born and I wanted to play, I had the time but not the state of mind and so the only game I was actually able to play during the first three months when he was born was John Wick Hex. I don't know if you played it. It's...

Lior Hadashian (01:23)
⁓ I heard about it. How is

Amit Netanel (01:24)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Lior Hadashian (01:26)
it?

Amit Netanel (01:26)
Cool game. Cool game.

Yuri Sokolov (01:28)
It's a cool game. It's an easy game. It's a game that you don't have to kind of dive into. You just, okay, I'll play one level and it's a tactical game. I think you specifically, Yulior will love it. It's close to what you've been developing most of your time as a professional developer. ⁓ yeah. So for me, relaxed. game that I can relax, it's a game I can play with one hand.

Lior Hadashian (01:57)
Huh? okay, I can understand that, yeah. ⁓ That's why I also... ⁓ it's obvious, but that's I love turn-based games, yeah, like...

Yuri Sokolov (02:09)
Exactly. That was what I'm talking about. If you thought otherwise, think again.

Amit Netanel (02:15)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Some people might have read far too much into this. ⁓ Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've been playing ⁓ Marvel Snap a bit this week. Yeah, yeah, I took a hiatus of about, I think, 10, almost a year off the game because ⁓ I thought that the meta was stale and ⁓ all the decks were the same. It's been a year.

Yuri Sokolov (02:20)
Yeah, probably. you've backed it.

Amit Netanel (02:43)
all the top decks are still the same, even more toxic. I mean, they just took parts of the new cards. But what they realized, and it's interesting to compare this to Hearthstone and all the other long-lasting ⁓ computer card games, they understood that people like the casual side way more than they like to climb to legend. So every two weeks, they rotate a basically RNG Fest mode.

Yuri Sokolov (02:46)
Really. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Amit Netanel (03:14)
They have several of them. Right now, today was the end of the high voltage season. High voltage is basically Marvel Snap, but shorter games, even shorter games. It's four turns, not six. And you get two draws each turn, and your cards are more powerful. And you pick a deck and get more random cards inserted into it. So it's basically RNG. It's an event.

Yuri Sokolov (03:26)
Mm-hmm. So it's an event.

Amit Netanel (03:42)
You get a cool card about in the middle because they got criticisms. That's the main thing they fixed. Previously, you had to grind for two weeks to hope to get the card you wanted. And now you get it after like two hours gameplay max. So it's really nice.

Yuri Sokolov (03:43)
Mm-hmm.

Lior Hadashian (03:54)
you Nice.

Yuri Sokolov (04:00)
Interesting, interesting. think the numbers, the numbers, it's, it's alive. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Regarding events, by the way, I was a smite player for a long time. We've played from since the closed beta of the first smite game and we've played me and a couple of friends who've been playing it for, I think five, six years. We even tried to compete on couple online tournaments and lost.

Amit Netanel (04:07)
Yeah, they go this way.

Lior Hadashian (04:09)
Okay.

Yuri Sokolov (04:31)
⁓ People, some children kicked our asses.

Amit Netanel (04:33)
As one does.

Yuri Sokolov (04:35)
So, regardless, ⁓ Smite was having like, know, League of Legends and Dota, they have mainly one map. I don't know, I've never was a ⁓ LOL or Dota player, but what I know, they mainly have one map. Maybe today it's not the case. Smite from the get-go had

Lior Hadashian (04:44)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (05:00)
couple of maps and couple of game modes and then they decided to run events so every day you would get a daily event and so for example I don't know everyone is a healer everyone enters the game as a healer the same player the same character and everybody runs with this character or your mana never runs out and you can play it was fun we actually Because we were playing... Yeah!

Amit Netanel (05:29)
Yeah, it keeps it fresh. gets it fresh, especially when you have like you said in League of Legends and all that, it is the same map for years and years and years. And the meta is the same. By the way, ⁓ speaking of ⁓ such ⁓ refreshes in games, ⁓ Heroes of the Storm, the MOBA of Blizzard, had a patch, the first patch in like three or four years recently. all of sudden, yeah, all of a sudden it's changing.

Yuri Sokolov (05:37)
Mm-hmm.

Lior Hadashian (05:38)
Mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (05:48)
Mm-hmm.

Lior Hadashian (05:52)
⁓ I thought it's abandoned. Okay.

Yuri Sokolov (05:55)
I thought they closed the game.

Lior Hadashian (05:57)
Yeah, that's what I go.

Amit Netanel (05:58)
they stopped developing new content. And the teaser for the most recent BlizzCon is they didn't explicitly say it, but it's themed around Heroes of the Storm. It has the announcer from the game doing the voiceover and stuff like that. And they shadow patched lots of stuff into the game and people are excited. And that's exactly the kind of stuff they did. The remixes of game modes make it more casual, more... more fun for both new audiences but mostly for people that play every week every day and gets tired of the same old meta.

Yuri Sokolov (06:37)
By the way, a fun fact about Dota, if we're talking about MOBAs and I was a MOBA fan for a long time. So you know the history of Dota, how this game became... Yeah, yeah, they did a mode for Warcraft 3 and then Dota and Dota 2 is already completely game of its own. So there was a game that somebody made a mode.

Lior Hadashian (06:48)
The walk of the free mode, ehm, mode map, yeah.

Amit Netanel (06:50)
Start as a mod.

Yuri Sokolov (07:07)
for Dota 2. It was called Auto Chess. I don't know if you played it. And then it turned into a game of its own.

Amit Netanel (07:15)
I play Teamfight Tactics, which ⁓ literally still prints money somehow. It is not known how it achieves that, because it's really a mod on top of League of Legends. When you install Teamfight Tactics, you have to install League of Legends alongside it. Still.

Yuri Sokolov (07:35)
It's probably like Fortnite Create or something.

Amit Netanel (07:38)
Something like that. But even Fortnite is not, Fortnite, the Battle Royale is now separate from the original vision.

Lior Hadashian (07:39)
so it's a mod for full yeah

Yuri Sokolov (07:47)
⁓ okay.

Lior Hadashian (07:48)
so it's a mode based on a game that came that based on a mode for another game like that's what you say

Yuri Sokolov (07:55)
Yeah, yeah, and then after they took the mode and because it was popular they developed a full game out of this and the guys at Valve, yeah, yeah, the guys at Valve saw that they said we want this as well so they released a Dota flavored ⁓ auto battler

Amit Netanel (07:56)
Basically.

Lior Hadashian (08:10)
Red valve.

Yuri Sokolov (08:23)
inspired by the mode that was done inside. It's a hell of an inception. Okay, so getting a little back. Yeah, yeah, Lior, can you tell us a little bit about yourself? Why would we want to invite you to our roundtable?

Amit Netanel (08:25)
you

Lior Hadashian (08:32)
Yeah.

Amit Netanel (08:34)
Getting back on track.

Lior Hadashian (08:35)
haha I don't know, it's a very bad idea, must be honest. ⁓ Yeah, I was like number 30 in the list. ⁓ But if I need to guess, to guess, to guess, not to guess, why would you invite me is because I was the co-founder of Gavra Games. ⁓ Not just a co-founder, I was like leading the technical team, technical team being the CTO. ⁓

Yuri Sokolov (08:48)
Yeah, we'll see that.

Amit Netanel (08:49)
One of our worst decisions.

Lior Hadashian (09:12)
I don't like the word CTO for an indie team because it's a big word CTO but you know, at the bottom line you're developing most of the time code but you're managing the team but CTO... I don't think. Yeah, but it was my title nevertheless.

Yuri Sokolov (09:27)
Yeah, I love your assumption, but actually we didn't know this. We invited you just to ask you what's the thing with the pizza.

Lior Hadashian (09:37)
Well, yeah, we'll get to that ⁓ Yeah, there is an origin story for that as well So yeah, basically that ⁓ I spent five or six depends how you counted ⁓ At the cover games bootstrap company me and my cousin and started it was my co-founder And we did like everything in this path. We raised money ⁓

Amit Netanel (09:38)
What's the thing with the pizza Leo?

Yuri Sokolov (09:41)
Sure.

Lior Hadashian (10:04)
from both investors, small investors. We were actually on TV once to... Yeah, or twice, you're correct. Once we raised money from TV and one time we didn't. We recruited more developers and artists. We managed to fully release our game. Six-player multiplayer game was very ambitious for a team that didn't know how to develop multiplayer games like...

Yuri Sokolov (10:11)
Twice,

Lior Hadashian (10:33)
This is if I need to in one paragraph to explain why I'm here, this is I think why I'm here.

Yuri Sokolov (10:39)
Yeah, and just without your an interesting person that we can talk to you. By the way, by the way, we're talking about Warriors Rise to Glory, a game you released somewhere in 2018 on Steam, right? Yeah. So we've talked about this a bit previously, I was playing the game in early access, I was

Lior Hadashian (10:44)
Thank you. You too. Early access version was 2018, yes.

Yuri Sokolov (11:03)
Even playing the game before it was released on Steam and Early Access, you were sending people copies over the email and I've played the hell out of this game. It was incomplete. It was short. basically I think there was one, only one boss fight there in this version in the early...

Lior Hadashian (11:09)
Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, how did we call it? ⁓ it was a spoof of the mountain. We call them the cliff. Yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (11:32)
Okay.

Amit Netanel (11:33)
Maybe it's a good time to describe the game because people will start to wonder how are all these references even relate to gladiators or rising to glory?

Lior Hadashian (11:41)
Yeah, okay. Yeah, you're correct. So basically the game is... ⁓ I forgot all our pitches. My other co-founder was in the business side, so he was telling all the pitches on the fly. So basically we took a fighting game and we made it more tactical, more turn-based, more into thinking. Not about... Exactly, it was inspired by Sword and Sandals.

Yuri Sokolov (12:06)
It was actually inspired by something else, no?

Lior Hadashian (12:11)
it was a goofy gladiator flash based in the web back in the days ⁓ and we played it like when we were teenagers, microphone co-founder more, I was playing it like a bit but I like it from the little I played it I liked the concept but it was like no individuals no ⁓

Yuri Sokolov (12:30)
Not the visuals. No, no, the visuals. I discovered this game only when I started to prepare for this interview. And I didn't know this. I went to look and I saw, first of all, I saw that you're selling your game as a bundle with them right now. And I went and found this game and I'm looking at it and I'm saying, nah. And like, I was there.

Lior Hadashian (12:39)
Mm-hmm. Yes, we have. Yeah. You

Yuri Sokolov (13:02)
where when flash games were a thing I've played the hell of flash games some ugly ones right so this is one of those games but actually out of the all of those ugly games there were a couple of pretty juicy games something that we we keep remembering

Amit Netanel (13:24)
Actually, I didn't know Sword and Sandals as well. And it's a damn shame, because looking back at what I played back when Flash was a thing, I would totally sink afternoons into Sword and Sandals type game. None of my friends knew it. There were some search engines like Newgrounds and stuff like that, but it was not.

Lior Hadashian (13:36)
Yeah, yeah, apparently, yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (13:39)
Okay, so let's take

Lior Hadashian (13:45)
but it's very weird because ⁓ so many of our players was like ⁓ it so reminds me of Soda Sanders like I didn't know how popular it was so I was shocked

Yuri Sokolov (13:58)
Interesting, interesting. Maybe because your players from the get-go were people that were familiar with this game. They were more drawn to your game because they were familiar with Swordian Ascendals. Actually, if...

Lior Hadashian (14:12)
Not only online, but also in conferences, like we were showing the game, even the kids, like not you think people in my age, kids were like, it's like so Nessandles. I, yeah, apparently, but I didn't know like it's still easy, a kid's game. It was amazing to see.

Yuri Sokolov (14:24)
It's a kids game. Interesting. Yeah, yeah, interesting. By the way, if we're

Amit Netanel (14:33)
So you say it's a fighting game. So it's fighting game, but ⁓ turn-based. Those don't mix usually.

Lior Hadashian (14:38)
Exactly. yeah, for the good and bad the good is they usually don't mix and there are no much other games but sadly as we came to understand like it's narrowing down your audience and sadly like whoever loves this game very much loves it but there are not a lot of people for it so sadly it was exactly like all the players who wanted it like finally but

Amit Netanel (15:04)
Yeah, the Venn diagram is very narrow in the... ⁓

Lior Hadashian (15:10)
That's it, like there are not much of them.

Yuri Sokolov (15:13)
I think maybe, just maybe, you were trying to sell the game in... Did you do localizations? What languages did you support?

Lior Hadashian (15:21)
yes let me remember because the question is which languages we didn't okay ⁓ of course we

Yuri Sokolov (15:30)
What about post-Soviet countries?

Lior Hadashian (15:34)
We did, we have Russian. Let me just, okay, now we did the Steam page. Of course we didn't, ⁓ it's a funny story, okay. When we released to early access, we didn't have any localization, we didn't even have any infrastructure. But I will get to that in a second. We have English, simplified Chinese, Korean, Spanish, Spanish-Spain because apparently there are variations. French, Russian, traditional Chinese, German, Polish, and Hebrew.

Yuri Sokolov (15:35)
Yeah.

Lior Hadashian (16:03)
So overall 10. Yeah. ⁓

Yuri Sokolov (16:04)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Then

Amit Netanel (16:05)
And,

Yuri Sokolov (16:07)
you covered your bases. Then you covered your bases. I wanted to say that ⁓ there was a time where browser-based games were a hit in post-Soviet countries. And the game like you... There were browser-based games that were similar. in nature to Warriors Rise to Glory. That's basically one of the reasons I liked the game at the time because it's like your... it wasn't online but browser games were online so when I was playing it, it wasn't a PvP experience. I was playing it in the early access, played it for I don't know 50 hours maybe tops

Lior Hadashian (16:35)
Mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (17:00)
maybe less. My Steam page says 18 hours, but I remember I was playing longer than that on the version that you've sent via email. I assume the total hours I spent in your game was around 50, I think. So in the early access, you know? When you released the game, I haven't played it.

Lior Hadashian (17:08)
Yeah, it was outside of Steam, yes. Thank you very much.

Amit Netanel (17:19)
That's impressive.

Lior Hadashian (17:23)
Wow. Yeah, I guess that's another point we'll get to, of course. I think we have so much points to get to, but we were talking about Russian, the Russian audience. Localization, yes, also. The thing is, when we were sending the game to our mailing list, you received it, were some requests to Russian influencers, and they were playing the game for free, course, was free at the time.

Amit Netanel (17:36)
localization. Yeah.

Lior Hadashian (17:54)
they were playing there was a lot of views for the Russians never translated into much sales like it stopped there it stopped with the pirated version it stopped with the influencer getting a lot of views but when we released it wasn't like blowing on the rush or something

Yuri Sokolov (18:03)
Yeah, yeah.

Amit Netanel (18:13)
well, know, back in the day, like 20 years ago, they used to say about the Israeli market that ⁓ it's a country of one disc or diskette, because we're talking about 20 years ago, because they used to copy the game to your friends. And I assume it's the natural evolution of things, because as you're more exposed to the West and to streaming technologies and

Lior Hadashian (18:23)
Hahaha It was. Okay.

Amit Netanel (18:38)
Let's face it, like, Steam is an easy marketplace. mean, the destination from seeing a game to buying it is not like going to the store and buying. So it's so different. But emerging markets still probably distribute games amongst themselves. ⁓ But actually, I don't know. It's a good question. Like, what happens today in post-Soviet countries? I don't know.

Lior Hadashian (18:47)
Yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (19:02)
I think we'll have to invite some indie developers from this area or other areas, people who released a game recently and talked to them. If you are that person, if you're listening to that and you are that person, we want you here and we want to talk to you.

Amit Netanel (19:06)
Definitely, definitely.

Lior Hadashian (19:07)
Yeah.

Amit Netanel (19:17)
Yeah. Come educate us on like that. I have another question about

Yuri Sokolov (19:21)
Yeah, so, Leon. Yeah.

Amit Netanel (19:25)
For those that don't know the game already and didn't go and look at as they listen to this podcast, ⁓ your game had lots of memes, cultural references, and stuff like that, which was mostly universal, like things that I saw on 9Gag. If I think about the website I was on during that time period. ⁓

Lior Hadashian (19:44)
Yeah, and I think it was a main inspiration,

Yuri Sokolov (19:45)
Mm-hmm.

Lior Hadashian (19:50)
It was, yeah.

Amit Netanel (19:53)
Did you localize any of the cultural references?

Lior Hadashian (19:56)
⁓ I think we have two ⁓ finishers that were developed while in the early access. My co-founder was more in charge of the creative decisions, let's call it like this, because he's an artist. And ⁓ we had like two anime-based finishers. So it was, ⁓ and I don't know how to call it, gesture for the Asian market.

Amit Netanel (20:17)
Mm-hmm.

Lior Hadashian (20:23)
We had one with the stripes in the back and everything where he was about to mega punch someone. And we also had the, it was a meme back at time, the Nani, you know it? Yeah. So we also had it, added in. ⁓ So yeah, it was for the cultural references ⁓ for the Asian market.

Amit Netanel (20:26)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. NANI?!

Yuri Sokolov (20:33)
Mm-hmm. but to

Amit Netanel (20:42)
But it didn't remove some references that will go over the heads of some markets. It was just adding more stuff so people were like, OK, cool.

Lior Hadashian (20:49)
No, no.

Yuri Sokolov (20:52)
I think Amit, as someone who grew up with three languages and spent his fair share on the internet in those three languages, the memes, they were the same for all of the languages, you know? So...

Amit Netanel (21:07)
Mm-hmm. It's the same I don't know, you always like, usually back when we were recording our previous podcast, you had that look in your eye. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You had that look in your eye if he knew the sentence he would have left.

Yuri Sokolov (21:24)
I would pull some saying that you didn't know. okay, here's the thing. If the meme... Yeah, yeah. No, basically if the meme originates from some English speaking country, then everybody knows this. The French, the Germans, the Russians, the Israeli, everybody would know the meme. But then again, English speaking people on the internet don't have this ability to take memes from other languages, you know? So...

Lior Hadashian (22:03)
Yeah, that's true.

Yuri Sokolov (22:05)
Basically every country has their own memes and everyone has the English memes.

Lior Hadashian (22:11)
that's true ⁓ yeah the thing also about memes like it's relevant for very... not all memes stand the trial of time because some of them are very relevant at the time we were developing them and some of them like we have the four people with the... how do you call it? yeah with the coffin, dancing and all that it was very popular at the time but I think now a little bit less

Amit Netanel (22:13)
tag life. That was a meme once upon a time. Yeah. with the coffin.

Yuri Sokolov (22:32)
with a with a coffin, right?

Amit Netanel (22:35)
Mm-hmm, the coffin song.

Lior Hadashian (22:38)
So it was very trying to be very relevant to the specific time we were developing. ⁓ But I also wanted to have another note, maybe a final notable localization. Like I said, when we released the game, we didn't have any infrastructure or we didn't even think about the consequences of not localizing the game. And suddenly after we released on early access a week, I think, a week or two,

Yuri Sokolov (22:49)
Mm-hmm.

Lior Hadashian (23:07)
a big influencer on bilibili, the youtube let's call it, of the chinese market we were playing, no we didn't pay, we didn't do anything, you just like the game when you're playing it and he brought us in, I think, one week, 3000 players but it's not a free to play title, it's a pay to play title so they were paying people, 3000 people we were shocked but the thing is, there were a lot of free fans

Yuri Sokolov (23:12)
Chinese.

Lior Hadashian (23:34)
because a lot of the refunds were because there is no Chinese localization. And we were like ninjas. ⁓ What did you say?

Yuri Sokolov (23:40)
Yeah.

Amit Netanel (23:42)
because Yeah, because China usually wants localization, right? It's a market that you have to usually need to localize for.

Lior Hadashian (23:47)
yeah we didn't even know yeah we

Yuri Sokolov (23:51)
It's usually China, Russia and Spain.

Lior Hadashian (23:54)
I think also Germany really like it.

Amit Netanel (23:57)
Brazil is one that likes localization. That's something I found out recently.

Yuri Sokolov (24:00)
Yes, this I don't not to say anything bad about people from those cultures. It's just the way it is. For example, ⁓ in Russia, the dubbing of movies is something that's, kind of, you know, it's, it's in the culture. So people watch movies dubbed.

Lior Hadashian (24:14)
⁓ yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (24:20)
and a lot of countries don't do it and there are countries that are doing it. So it's kind of basically in the culture.

Amit Netanel (24:22)
So weird.

Lior Hadashian (24:29)
Yeah.

Amit Netanel (24:29)
Is it

Yuri Sokolov (24:29)
and

Amit Netanel (24:30)
still dubbed over the movie itself? Like you start to hear the English and then it intercepts?

Lior Hadashian (24:33)
I like our side quest

Yuri Sokolov (24:39)
No, the proper dubbing is never dubbed over. You have a lot of dubbing made by some teams out there that earn their money on websites that stream illegal copies. And there are professional dubbing that is approved by the creators of the movies. And for example, you would have, I don't know, somebody who is dubbing Arnold Schwarzenegger in all of the movies. So he is the voice of Arnold Schwarzenegger in all movies.

Lior Hadashian (25:26)
Mm.

Yuri Sokolov (25:27)
And no, it's actually dubbed one-to-one. Then you would have Vin Diesel who would dub himself, I am Groot, in every possible language. Or Danny DeVito. Or Danny DeVito who dubbed himself in one of the animated movies in multiple languages. He spoke multiple languages. But we drifted so far...

Amit Netanel (25:39)
Yeah. He's a polyglot for sure, yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (25:56)
We drift itself

Amit Netanel (25:56)
No, that's the end of the side quest. We get XP. go back to the, yeah. want, So let's segue into the, said you started to localize without framework.

Lior Hadashian (25:58)
Yeah, it was localization. Yeah for another medium, what I wanted, yeah what I wanted, okay

Yuri Sokolov (25:59)
Yay.

Lior Hadashian (26:11)
without Wagon what? Yeah, yeah. So we had to quickly ⁓ localize. We didn't know the pipeline overflow of localization because you don't go to Google Translate and simply translate it. Good thing we had like a contact at Altagram. was the localization company we had from the...

Amit Netanel (26:12)
without framework in the technological product.

Yuri Sokolov (26:13)
without a framework.

Lior Hadashian (26:35)
the go-to, because we were going to Gamescom, we had meetings, and one of them was with this company. So we had a meeting with them, let's talk with them. So we immediately needed to centralize all the text in the game, send it to them, this was the logistic part, but also in the game itself, in the Unity engine, the game wasn't built to be with dynamic text, and some of them were very short, like it's Chinese.

Yuri Sokolov (27:01)
Mm-hmm.

Lior Hadashian (27:04)
and we didn't even have the framework to easily switch them and we were like ninjas in one week we both send it, we both received it, we both as fast as we can converted the game to work with localization and published the Chinese version to the Steam after one week it was like I don't know how we did it to be honest

Yuri Sokolov (27:28)
Well, I remember.

Amit Netanel (27:29)
Would you do it again? Would you do it again this way?

Lior Hadashian (27:33)
Next time we'll prepare,

Amit Netanel (27:33)
What's the lesson here?

Lior Hadashian (27:35)
next time we'll do a proper infrastructure. This is what I know.

Amit Netanel (27:40)
to do

Yuri Sokolov (27:40)
So

Amit Netanel (27:40)
it

Yuri Sokolov (27:41)
basically.

Amit Netanel (27:41)
in one week. One week is a hell of a... It's a short time to do something like that.

Lior Hadashian (27:45)
Yeah, it was working. There were bugs. There were like a few missed translations. There were like visual quirks, but we just wanted it to be good enough to be released and for people not to refund it because of the lack of Exactly. It was bleeding. We were like we were seeing 15 15 percent ⁓ Refunds and it was so hurting maybe I think even 20 percent and you think like my god, we're losing 20 percent of the revenue

Amit Netanel (27:58)
Stop the refunds

Lior Hadashian (28:15)
And yes.

Yuri Sokolov (28:15)
I have a fun story about localization. We worked at one company. had a big mobile game that were developed for, I don't know, three, four years at the time by a lot of people. The team globally, including marketing and all the stuff was 50 people, I think, working on this game specifically. And the game was never... considered to be localized. And at some point we get a task, start a localization. And we discover, first thing I discover, I lead this as a tech lead and there are a couple of developers, one developer in particular that worked on this hands-on, I helped him and worked with artists. And first thing that I noticed when we're starting to work on this, is the font we're using is not supporting other languages, right? So Hispanic languages, basically any letter that has ⁓ any Latin letter that has dots or I don't know, stuff like that. I don't remember how that called. The font didn't support it. So we're starting to look into that. And the first thing the artist tell me is, you know, you can, I told, okay, I can edit the font. It's kind of easy. need help from artists to edit it. Here's an app. And the artist tell me that we need to check for the license because the license of the font might not permit editing. So I'm searching for the license and apparently,

Lior Hadashian (30:04)
Mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (30:10)
This font was illegal. So the main font of the game was illegal. It was one of the fonts you find in... When you search in Google free fonts and don't look for the license, it just was a stolen font. Copyrighted. And we... I think...

Lior Hadashian (30:13)
Wait, the whole font? Like the whole usage?

Amit Netanel (30:15)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Lior Hadashian (30:32)
wow.

Yuri Sokolov (30:38)
couple of months before releasing the game for a soft launch and ⁓ the main font, the game is huge. Okay, it's a couple of years into development, a lot, a lot of texts and we discovered that the font is illegal.

Lior Hadashian (30:51)
Mm-hmm. Can't you just pay for a license for the font?

Yuri Sokolov (30:56)
No, no, no, the font itself is illegal. So basically the font we downloaded, downloaded, the creator, the creator quote unquote, took someone's font and copied it and sold the copy. So not sold, just distributed the copy. So you can't purchase it. You can't go to the original because the original font is not digital.

Lior Hadashian (31:11)
⁓

Amit Netanel (31:12)
Mm-hmm.

Lior Hadashian (31:17)
Yeah. wow.

Yuri Sokolov (31:26)
Some, some stuff like this. And we needed to find, so we have a couple of months until release. And now not only we need to localize the game, so it will look nice in all those different languages. Because again, for example, for, for you, it was Chinese for us, it was German. In a German language, you have, they tend to have those long words and.

Lior Hadashian (31:55)
Mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (31:57)
Sometimes when in our game in English we would write a couple of words, every word on a separate line, now we need to support long lines and it is not supported and we need to convert it somehow. In addition to that, we now need to replace the font all over the game. It was a pain. We pulled it off, me and the developer that worked on it, we pulled it off, I think in...

Lior Hadashian (32:05)
Yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (32:27)
two, three weeks, including help of our artists that worked on the... So we built a tool that we built a couple of tools. And it's kind of, if anyone listens, it's great. It's easy tools to implement yourself, especially today with the help of AI, but they are, you need to think about them. You need to know what you're looking for.

Lior Hadashian (32:28)
Amazing.

Amit Netanel (32:48)
Yeah, yeah, much easier today.

Yuri Sokolov (32:55)
So we built one tool was just going over all of the prefabs in the game and taking screenshots. Just taking screenshots of the prefabs. So this would help us to identify where our text. The other tool, scanning all the prefabs, all the scenes and pulling all game objects with a text on them, finding similar texts and creating them, putting them into a single database.

Lior Hadashian (33:20)
That smile

Yuri Sokolov (33:25)
assigning a similar key and then outputting a CSV file with all texts that we can then ⁓ change. And the third tool was we would put on each text field, we would put a component that would allow us to switch languages and per language to decide what ⁓ aspects of these game objects to save. So to save position, rotation, size, font size, font color, even the font itself. So any property would be different pair language. So we had this capability. It's really easy to implement if you think about it, but people often do not think about it. So they start to looking for a hard way.

Amit Netanel (34:09)
Like with AI, I

Lior Hadashian (34:10)
It's very smart.

Amit Netanel (34:12)
would say, OK, it's at least two weeks work. And it was before LLMs were a thing, were even a thing that we talked about. Like it was way before that, right? So extreme effort there. Also, you make me think about, Like I'm really listening to this story that I know, by the way. And.

Yuri Sokolov (34:27)
Yeah, yeah, it was a couple of...

Amit Netanel (34:38)
I'm saying, wait, what if I want to localize my game that I'm working on right now? Won't I need all of those tools again?

Yuri Sokolov (34:46)
Yes, you probably will. You

Lior Hadashian (34:47)
⁓

Yuri Sokolov (34:48)
probably

Lior Hadashian (34:48)
yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (34:48)
will. That's why I'm telling it because you can now you have, I can do that and I can easily pull it off, especially today. And, ⁓ yeah, that, that was our success story with localization.

Amit Netanel (34:50)
Damn.

Lior Hadashian (35:02)
That's amazing. We were like manually going over text in the game, copying it to a CSV. it was before I was able to think like ⁓ metotology. So before thinking like automation, ⁓ it's much more smarter what you did.

Amit Netanel (35:04)
Great success.

Yuri Sokolov (35:20)
I'll tell you why I thought of those things. It was kind of easy for me because I was on the other side at some point. Long before I became a developer, I tried myself in all kinds of things. And I remember ⁓ being a part of a localization team for GTA 3, ⁓ not the official localization team, just a couple of people on the internet.

Lior Hadashian (35:46)
Hmm

Yuri Sokolov (35:48)
We tried to localize GTA 3 into Russian and yeah, yeah, as a mod. I, back then I saw the tools that were used to, ⁓ that people who work with localizations work. So it's outside of the game. It's outside of the game engine long before I saw how real game engine looks like. So I saw that and then I understood no.

Amit Netanel (35:52)
as a mod, basically.

Yuri Sokolov (36:19)
People who translate games do not work inside Unity. They work with CSVs. I need to export this, it's easier. I need keys assigned per text. I need this and that. So it was kind of a bit easier for me to think about the approaches.

Lior Hadashian (36:25)
out. What we did, ⁓ besides doing manually things, we didn't build it from scratch, the localization. We actually bought an asset from Asset Store. It's called I2 localization. Amazing.

Yuri Sokolov (36:47)
I have

Amit Netanel (36:47)
⁓

Yuri Sokolov (36:48)
a huge story about that, but I won't tell it because it would be considered... No, I won't tell. I won't talk about it. I... Okay, no.

Amit Netanel (36:48)
we compared it. Yeah.

Lior Hadashian (36:50)
Ha

Amit Netanel (36:54)
Inside the, it's yeah, yeah, yeah. You can't talk about that. I know that other story as well. Maybe we

Lior Hadashian (36:56)
Okay, I really like... Okay.

Amit Netanel (37:02)
release it. Maybe we should consider like we're already planning an after show after this. So maybe we'll still record it and maybe monetize it. Just a thought. Just a thought, you guys.

Lior Hadashian (37:08)
Mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (37:14)
we will monetize only this part, right? We're not monetizing anything but this part we will. Just kidding.

Amit Netanel (37:20)
Yeah, you

Lior Hadashian (37:21)
Wait, we're doing a commercial? What are we doing?

Amit Netanel (37:22)
know, the hot parts. Yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (37:25)
Your pain has at the end of the interview.

Lior Hadashian (37:28)
I can't hear you, have connection problems. Yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (37:29)
⁓ Yeah, so let's let's get back to warriors and

Amit Netanel (37:29)
I'm entering a tunnel.

Yuri Sokolov (37:36)
so it was an indie game that you were able to raise money and as you said you were also on a TV and shark tan

Lior Hadashian (37:44)
Yes, we were. Yes, we did. ⁓ First of all, I think I didn't say my partner's is Shai Shemtov, so people won't think I'm stealing his credit. ⁓ Yeah, so we were on the Sharok tank, which is pretty funny because I think we were at some conference, I don't even remember which one it was, but it was here in Israel. And there was like someone from the production who were looking for inventors and my partner talked to them and he just signed us up. It was like, yeah, why not? We didn't think about at all about getting money. Like we said, who will invest us in the shark tank? But you you get opportunities, exposure, ⁓ you take what you can, you're indie. And the first time we came to the shark tank.

Yuri Sokolov (38:32)
Mm-hmm.

Lior Hadashian (38:38)
Boy, I was so nervous. Even though I wasn't the one who speaking, my partner was the extrovert, I was so nervous being on, like me on television, I'm an introvert. And I had like two lines, just ⁓ how much we're asking and how much we are giving percentage from the company. That's I had to say there. my God. I was like, okay, I have one shot, one shot. Not to stutter. Yeah.

Amit Netanel (38:59)
How many times did you rehearse the answer in your head before the show?

Lior Hadashian (39:08)
And so, ⁓ yeah, no, first of all, there is like a structure. You have to offer them something. We offered for 10 % of the company 400,000 checkers, which is equal equals.

Yuri Sokolov (39:08)
So what did they offer you? $30,000, something like that.

Lior Hadashian (39:26)
No, $130, $400,000. So yeah, something like this. Yes.

Yuri Sokolov (39:30)
Okay, so 100,000 dollars.

Amit Netanel (39:31)
Okay. How about

Lior Hadashian (39:37)
Yeah, and ⁓ that was our offer. And luckily for us, we already came with a small investor behind us. So that's something I'm telling about our story. Like ⁓ sometimes don't just think about the money. Investor also saying ⁓ signaling to others, there is something in this because someone invested in us. So the fact that we can meet early investment before them gave us support and a back.

Yuri Sokolov (39:59)
Mm-hmm.

Lior Hadashian (40:07)
something to back us up. So we had the confidence. Exactly. So we were confident to ask for more money. sadly, they renegotiated and ⁓ the best we could offer back was, think, 15 % for the same money. But someone, only one offered us back and he wanted 20%. And I don't know why we didn't have that much money, but we still declined.

Yuri Sokolov (40:08)
Yeah, it's also putting a price on your company because...

Lior Hadashian (40:36)
We declined politely and we came out of there like, did we just say no to 130k?

Amit Netanel (40:42)
You

Lior Hadashian (40:45)
huh? Like, but.

Yuri Sokolov (40:46)
yeah in hindsight was it stupid

Lior Hadashian (40:50)
No, it was the best thing we did because on prime television everyone saw us rejecting and standing for our what we think our company will be worth a lot more so on the inside on them, don't know how to say it like ⁓ Looking backwards. It was the best thing we could have achieved for that it was the the the not the fame but the prestige we had and the name and people were like, my god, they really believe in their company and apparently lot of people are watching Shark Tank I had no idea. Like everyone came to us like, my God, you were at Shark Tank, I saw you on TV. I'm like, who watches this stuff? I don't watch TV.

Amit Netanel (41:30)
By way, but did you manage to leverage it to a larger investment, like down the road?

Lior Hadashian (41:36)
So, sadly, not immediately. We were just ⁓ focused on releasing the game to early access. was even before we made money. So we didn't even ever...

Yuri Sokolov (41:46)
At this point, you were running on what capital you were running on.

Lior Hadashian (41:51)
you're going to laugh but $40,000 we received that's it

Yuri Sokolov (41:56)
You received from your initial investment. Why laugh? Today, it's slightly below an average check for an indie company. So it's a lot of money. It depends on what country you're living in. So basically I'm listening to multiple podcasts on ⁓ indie developers and the consensus is the same.

Amit Netanel (41:59)
from the one that invested in you at the beginning. Cool.

Lior Hadashian (42:00)
Yeah, exactly.

Yuri Sokolov (42:26)
So if you're living in a country when you can live for the cost of living is one, two thousands of euros or something like this, you can be a successful Indy. If you're living, I don't know, somewhere in US where you have to pay 10,000, where the price of living, cost of living is around $10,000, it's a lot harder.

Amit Netanel (42:38)
Mm-hmm.

Lior Hadashian (42:51)
Yeah, definitely.

Amit Netanel (42:52)
Yeah, have much less runway, much less runway. You're always on the lookout for more investment because just the burn rate is so high. They have to.

Lior Hadashian (43:02)
Mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (43:02)
And the money, what you earn at the end of the day, it doesn't matter where your game was developed. You earn the same money, the same success brings you the same money. ⁓

Amit Netanel (43:09)
Mm-hmm.

Lior Hadashian (43:11)
That's true. ⁓ Yeah, definitely. Yes. It's not cheap where we live. ⁓ Luckily we had, I'm not sure if luckily, but we didn't give ourselves salaries from this budget. Like it was all going to the game, some marketing. We even hired more people from this money. And the fact that I'm saying it's not a lot because you were talking about publisher deals, $40,000.

Yuri Sokolov (43:40)
Mm-hmm.

Lior Hadashian (43:40)
for a gain, but we gave percentage of the company, which means everything in the future will get them revenues, if there is a future to the company, of course. But ⁓ it was a very cheap price back at the time. But yeah, we were working part-time with the same investor. We had like a triangle of a relationship there. ⁓ So we had a burn rate, like we had money for our stuff, but at the cost of

Yuri Sokolov (43:44)
of the company.

Amit Netanel (43:45)
Mmm.

Yuri Sokolov (43:47)
Yeah, yeah. Mm-hmm.

Lior Hadashian (44:07)
less time developing the game, but we did push through late nights and everything. And regarding your question, Amit, so we did leverage it because we released finally the early access. had sales. We had about, after the localization, shenanigans and everything, about 10,000 copies sold in two months, which is a lot for early access game.

Yuri Sokolov (44:31)
10.000 copies in 2 months? Yeah. What was your price on release? 10 $ and you started with a discount or you...

Lior Hadashian (44:34)
Yeah, it- Ten dollars. I think so, maybe 10%, something like this. Then maybe 15, no, this was 10 I think.

Amit Netanel (44:49)
Did you raise the price after exiting early access?

Lior Hadashian (44:53)
We did, to $20. Yes, we added so much content ever since then, yes. Exactly, it was already discounted and we stated that in the access page, like you're getting it, it's the best price there will ever be. But anyway, with 10 thousand copies, we came again to the Shirk Tank. It was an interesting fact, the producer came to us again and told us, maybe you want to come again.

Amit Netanel (44:57)
So that's the real discount.

Yuri Sokolov (45:07)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Lior Hadashian (45:23)
And we were really debating because we were afraid that like it's either a big success or a big fail because you can come there and they will make a laugh at you like, my God, you're coming again. How desperate you are. ⁓ But on the other end, we came with some receipts. We actually made money from something we believed in. So we were debating a lot, but at the end we decided to go again. I don't care because my partner was talking.

Yuri Sokolov (45:38)
Mm-hmm.

Lior Hadashian (45:52)
Again, had the same two lines. no, I had four lines. I was telling previously, like, let's see what happened previously when we came, they showed the video, and then again, the price we're asking. This time we asked for more, we asked for 2,040 USD for the same amount of percentage. For 10%, yes. We came with more labels, if you can say it.

Amit Netanel (45:55)
Wow.

Yuri Sokolov (46:05)
and

Amit Netanel (46:07)
It's a promotion right there.

Yuri Sokolov (46:12)
240 for 10 %

Amit Netanel (46:17)
That's way better.

Yuri Sokolov (46:20)
Okay, and how did it end up?

Lior Hadashian (46:20)
and then it was amazing so I think we did leverage it like the fact that they knew we believe in ourselves they saw we're still developing and we made money and ⁓ there were five judges four of them wanted to invest and they were like fighting among themselves

Yuri Sokolov (46:38)
fighting each other. So what did they offer you?

Lior Hadashian (46:42)
At the end, I think it was 20 % for the same money. So 2000, no 2000. Yeah, 240 USD for 20 % of the company. We accepted the deal, yes. We accepted them. We also got the two judges we wanted. If someone knows them, it's...

Yuri Sokolov (46:51)
240.

Amit Netanel (46:52)
Mm. or 20%.

Yuri Sokolov (46:57)
And you accepted the deal.

Lior Hadashian (47:08)
it's been Lukach at and the differences. we were, we were happy like both with the amount, both with the people, because after all, you don't just want stupid money. You also want good people with you in the investor panel. Exactly. ⁓

Yuri Sokolov (47:12)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, people that can guide you at the end of the day. So...

Amit Netanel (47:25)
Yeah, they can guide you and and you got invested once that's like a golden ticket for the rest of your career. Like I know I won't name anyone, but I know several like ⁓ entrepreneurs that, you know, the ship burned down with them and the entire dock in their first endeavor. It was totally unsuccessful. But the

Lior Hadashian (47:48)
I know stories as well, yes.

Amit Netanel (47:52)
The fact that they managed to raise money helped them in the second endeavor and the third.

Yuri Sokolov (47:57)
I think there is a difference, there's a lot of difference between an indie game, that indie company that raises money for an indie title. Of course, if the title was successful, if the team was shipped the game, it will grant them some privileges when they're raising money for the second time. But yeah, but what you're talking about is you're talking about companies that are non-indie, ⁓ companies that

Amit Netanel (48:16)
Absolutely. ⁓ Shipping is the most important thing, I think.

Yuri Sokolov (48:26)
are selling stuff like live services, services, live service games. This is a bit different because receiving an investment from a VC is different from receiving an investment from a publisher or something like this.

Amit Netanel (48:40)
I'm not sure. Well, you're correct in both the scale of the money you need to raise and the stakes of the, I think the potential earnings for someone that invests in live service games. It's basically like you're investing in a startup company. Okay. It's much riskier, but you can gain your money 10, 20, a hundred times. Right. but, the,

Yuri Sokolov (48:47)
Mm-hmm.

Lior Hadashian (49:01)
Mm-hmm.

Amit Netanel (49:09)
The clout, for lack of a better word, the clout you get from raising money, I think, is about the same. That guy managed to lose someone else's money successfully is a huge career ⁓ landmark, I would say. It's better than losing someone's money as a paycheck.

Yuri Sokolov (49:32)
Yeah, it's...

Amit Netanel (49:38)
Okay, it's much more powerful.

Yuri Sokolov (49:39)
I think people that are listening to this aren't familiar with the investment world and I think we need to bring in an investor and I have just one in mind. Yeah, yeah. ⁓

Amit Netanel (49:49)
Hmm. Yeah, I have someone on my mind too. Yeah.

Lior Hadashian (49:52)
I wonder if you all think of the same person, but okay.

Yuri Sokolov (49:55)
Yeah, yeah, we think of that. Okay, we'll put it on the table. We already have someone on the pipeline. Yeah, yeah. So, and you heard it here first, we'll bring an investor to the show. Yeah. What I wanted to ask is I'm looking at game analytics here. And I often when I'm looking at the stats here, I'm often wondering how accurate

Amit Netanel (50:02)
You have someone lined up for the future.

Lior Hadashian (50:03)
Okay. exclusive.

Yuri Sokolov (50:25)
they are. So it says here that your game sold between 22 and 45,000 copies and earned something between 170,000 to $346,000.

Lior Hadashian (50:41)
I I need to see myself how much we sold ⁓ it's correct nice like it's a big range but it's correct

Yuri Sokolov (50:44)
You Okay, I'll tell you what they're putting as a confident number. So, ⁓ copy sold 33,700.

Lior Hadashian (51:00)
close, very close it's a little bit above but close wow, nice

Yuri Sokolov (51:04)
and the gross revenue they are assuming is $257,000.

Lior Hadashian (51:13)
coders to them. Wow. Nice. I don't know how they know it, nice.

Yuri Sokolov (51:15)
Yeah? Really? They estimate everything, this kind of funny, they estimate most of the things, they estimate from comments, from reviews to a game. nobody knows how much wish lists you have. So they estimate wish lists based on the amount of reviews your game received.

Lior Hadashian (51:45)
Okay, what did they estimate about us?

Yuri Sokolov (51:48)
wishlist, outstanding wishlist, 18 700.

Lior Hadashian (51:54)
See?

Amit Netanel (51:56)
we're running a comparison against the real data. Hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (51:59)
Yeah, yeah, 18,700.

Lior Hadashian (52:00)
How much do you did you say?

Yuri Sokolov (52:07)
18. less than that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They probably counted the total and the owners they say 46,000 owners of the game with 33,000 sold.

Lior Hadashian (52:23)
Mm-hmm. how come 46 like how come there are more owners than sold

Yuri Sokolov (52:37)
I don't know.

Amit Netanel (52:38)
Did you, were you part of a bundle or something? Yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (52:41)
Maybe.

Lior Hadashian (52:41)
A little bit, Humble Bundle, the new influencers and such, but no, it's not close to this number. The sales were almost correct, but the overall players, no.

Yuri Sokolov (52:47)
not 13 000 So let's get off this number. $257,000 in revenue before 30 % steam cut, before taxes. And the company, does Gavra Games exists today?

Lior Hadashian (53:02)
Very close, yes.

Amit Netanel (53:04)
Before Texas. Yeah.

Lior Hadashian (53:05)
Of course. Yeah, it still exists. It's still like, let's call it a skeleton crew. The game, we insisted like our investors like the day after talk with us about the future like, okay, so when it closed, we told them like, no, the game is running, people already bought it. Like you want them to be able to play it. So we insisted on keeping it alive. Like it's making enough to be self-contained like. ⁓

Yuri Sokolov (53:41)
self-contained I think.

Lior Hadashian (53:42)
yeah, self contained and ⁓ so Gover Games is alive but not kicking

Yuri Sokolov (53:48)
So you would say the investment was a poor decision on the investors side.

Lior Hadashian (53:48)
Ha ha. Certainly, we were in the statistics, right? Like there is a percentage of startups who will make up for the other who didn't. Yeah, we were at the bad side of statistics, certainly. Yes.

Yuri Sokolov (54:03)
Yeah, yeah, So the investors are usually would invest into a lot of companies and they're not looking to make twice as much as they invested three times. They're looking to get 50 times as much as the investment.

Lior Hadashian (54:15)
Yeah.

Amit Netanel (54:20)
Yeah. But that's just the thing. mean, for just one of them, they need to make 50, 100, and more multipliers. And the other investments are good for many, many, other reasons. It ⁓ supports the local industry. Maybe you're invested in that in other ways. You need talent. You need to raise talent. That's a huge issue today that juniors can't find work.

Lior Hadashian (54:21)
⁓ yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (54:28)
Yeah, exactly. That's why they diversify.

Amit Netanel (54:50)
due to recent developments in the AI and LLM markets. ⁓ You need people to do the good games that you will make 50 to 100 multipliers on. ⁓ So Lior, in a way, ⁓ is ⁓ the fact that ⁓ he's still alive, maybe not kicking, but his company is. He teaches other people through this podcast and other ways how to make games, how to

Lior Hadashian (55:11)
you

Amit Netanel (55:20)
correctly localize stuff. So you need to think about the bigger picture as an investor. You also need to think about the profit, I'm sure. ⁓ So Lior, did you like, mean, ⁓ so Gavra Games is kind of in a zombie state. But did you leverage anything from the project technologically?

Lior Hadashian (55:31)
Yeah, yeah. ⁓

Yuri Sokolov (55:34)
A question that... Yeah.

Lior Hadashian (55:43)
Yeah.

Amit Netanel (55:49)
Did you make a technical retrospective on what you did there?

Lior Hadashian (55:55)
I'm doing like, let's call it the local tour with the lecture I like to do like, it's like a mix between post-mortem and lessons I learned and lessons I wish I knew before starting this. And this is lecture I very much like to do. Like a lot of these points you had like in this podcast right now, but it's like a straight structure and timeline like...

Yuri Sokolov (56:16)
Mm-hmm. structured.

Lior Hadashian (56:22)
each phase what we learned, what we would have done better. And it's something I very much to do both to my students and to other developers. also was in games gathering in 2022. I was in Bratislava and the first time I did it was there. I was super nervous. Yes, there is a recording in the internet. I was super nervous. ⁓ It was just when I started doing like...

Yuri Sokolov (56:40)
I think there's a recording in the internet on YouTube there is a recording

Lior Hadashian (56:48)
my own talks because before that I had my partner to rely on like he was the one who was talking and suddenly I was the center of attention. Yeah, so if you hear me stutter and excited, it's because I was. But I must say about the investors, investors also like, of course, like Amit, you say that it's giving you a good record if you get invested, but also it's the reputation you gain. And we were like very, very careful with our investor money, like a little bit too much careful. ⁓ But it's a...

Amit Netanel (57:23)
What do you mean? What do you mean? Like you didn't use it quick enough? Maybe?

Lior Hadashian (57:26)
Yeah, they didn't like

Yuri Sokolov (57:27)
You didn't use it for pizza?

Lior Hadashian (57:28)
our conservative... No, we were actually paying pizza for our own money, you understand? How much we were conservative with our money because... And they didn't like it. They wanted to go big or go home and scale up.

Amit Netanel (57:30)
Ha ha.

Lior Hadashian (57:44)
put it all in marketing, put it all in people. Like, we were like, no, no, no, we need to have a budget. We need to put it slowly, slowly. they wanted the startup way, like not our family business way.

Yuri Sokolov (57:59)
Yeah, I remember listening to one podcast when somebody told that he started developing a game alone and he would stream his development process on Twitch and some company, some publisher contacted him and said, wow, we really liked what you're doing and we want to sign you, we want to give you money so you would develop it. He said, okay, me, don't know, he said something. $20,000, $30,000, I deliver it to you. And they looked at him and said, you're alone? Yes. We'll give you more. I don't remember the exact number he said, but something along the lines of $200,000. And you have to hire a crew. You won't work alone from this, from now on. We want a full team. got the same amount of time, but you'll have to work with a team, hire a team. And suddenly he had to, used to work alone. He wasn't a developer or anything. He was learning along the way and suddenly he had to hire people, manage a studio and the first opportunity he got, he

Amit Netanel (59:09)
Now, it adds lots of risk on the end of the investors, the fact that they didn't do it previously.

Yuri Sokolov (59:14)
Yeah, and

Lior Hadashian (59:14)
Actually, yeah, it's a big shift from being a solar developer to a manager.

Yuri Sokolov (59:20)
Well, he developed the game for a couple of years and streamed it with constant progress with a lot of people watching. So at the end it was a success. They saw it was a success. And then he said the moment he had the opportunity, he fired everyone and started working lean again.

Amit Netanel (59:37)
You

Yuri Sokolov (59:39)
So yeah, there's that. But what I wanted to ask regarding money, so let's get back to the earn roughly $250,000 and then the investment roughly the same amount. And it's not going anywhere. Did you consider going mobile?

Lior Hadashian (1:00:00)
We did, that was our plan. That's what we said to our investors. Like we wanted to finish the PC version and then like use all the revenue to both use it for the mobile and also raise more capital. ⁓

Yuri Sokolov (1:00:17)
Revenue, you're talking about user acquisition, assume, to stream it into the... because the development process...

Lior Hadashian (1:00:23)
both scaling a team and raising money for ⁓ mostly marketing and we actually tried to raise money before launching the 1.0 and every time we wanted to raise money for mobile everyone told us the same thing you don't know mobile you are for your PC developer and they all said also the same thing

Yuri Sokolov (1:00:30)
Mm-hmm.

Lior Hadashian (1:00:49)
get someone from the mobile industry on your team, we will invest in you. And ⁓ boy, getting the people from the mobile was so hard. They wanted so much money. I was shocked.

Amit Netanel (1:00:54)
Hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (1:00:54)
That's right.

Amit Netanel (1:01:00)
Yep.

Yuri Sokolov (1:01:03)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the mobile industry, there's a difference. So when you're indie, you're doing it for passion. We talked about this in one of our previous episodes. You're doing it for passion. There is not a lot of money in there because because as an indie game, you're not bringing a lot of revenue. can't be paid that much as, for example, if you're taking a mobile game that that earns roughly 500 million dollars in a year or a billion dollars in a year. Yeah, the developers and the artists would earn a lot more there. So that's the trade-off.

Amit Netanel (1:01:47)
It's just hard to bring talent when ⁓ you pay less than the competition. You have to compete in a market that rolls in money, And it's difficult.

Lior Hadashian (1:01:58)
Yeah, but we didn't want to pay them instantly. it was very hard to catch someone who was willing to wait until we raised the money and then we bring him. Like it was the egg and the chicken. Like the investors want us to bring the talent. Talent want us to bring the money. So I know we don't know how to do it.

Amit Netanel (1:02:08)
Mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (1:02:11)
Mm-hmm.

Amit Netanel (1:02:14)
Hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (1:02:17)
The investors probably didn't want you to bring the talent, they wanted you to bring in a co-founder. That's probably what they wanted, a co-founder with a mobile experience. Well, okay, so you already passed that, you're relatively successful indie company. Not a lot of indie companies can say they earned

Lior Hadashian (1:02:33)
Yeah, no. Yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (1:02:46)
a quarter of million dollars and raised the same amount from investors. It's really successful indie company. You're trying to go mobile now. What happened?

Lior Hadashian (1:02:48)
That's true. Like I said, ⁓ so we didn't have enough money to develop the mobile after the release. The release wasn't as good as we hoped and expected it to be. And we weren't able to raise any money, not from external investors, not even from internal investors. And this is a very bad sign.

Yuri Sokolov (1:03:21)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Lior Hadashian (1:03:27)
many

Amit Netanel (1:03:27)
Hmm.

Lior Hadashian (1:03:28)
of your own investors telling you, I think we're out, it's not good. And sadly here, there was no hope for a mobile version because we were like, even if we wanted to do it of our own time with barely any money, we were so burnt out because we were running on low fuel because we were expecting just a little bit and then it becomes the boom and... Sadly, we were like, which my partners used to say tongs out and now, now we didn't have a bigger, when the investor said no, we both said like, okay, enough.

Yuri Sokolov (1:04:01)
Mm-hmm. Got it. Yeah, yeah, it's a bad sign. But a more technical question, like forget about the all the quirks that mobile has in terms of user acquisition, what the user expects from a game and the target audience and everything like this. Let's say you just want to put your game out there as is without without buying users without anything. ⁓

Amit Netanel (1:04:11)
Understandable. without even changing the experience in any way. It would suck, but technically.

Yuri Sokolov (1:04:39)
the sort. Yeah, yeah, yeah, without changing the experience, how hard would it be, technically wise?

Lior Hadashian (1:04:41)
⁓ no. No, technically wise, ⁓ it might run. I think it won't be optimized at all for mobile, but ⁓ gameplay wise, the UI and experience is so not for mobile. I can't even imagine it. Being able to...

Amit Netanel (1:05:01)
You need a keyboard to play, right? You have keyboard shortcuts and hotkeys and stuff like that. Okay.

Lior Hadashian (1:05:04)
You don't have to, you can play only with the mouse, but the UI just won't work, won't work. It will be so... You won't be able to press anything. It's very much ⁓ cluttered, think. Cluttered? Dense. And it's mainly UI UX work, but also I think technically it won't be optimized. If we are talking about technical depth, the club, the game has a lot of technical depth. A lot.

Yuri Sokolov (1:05:16)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Amit Netanel (1:05:31)
you

Yuri Sokolov (1:05:33)
I have yet to see a project without it.

Amit Netanel (1:05:37)
What Unity version did you start the project on?

Lior Hadashian (1:05:37)
⁓ okay. Unity 5.3 Yeah, 3.3 Yes Maybe 0.2

Yuri Sokolov (1:05:43)
Six, three.

Amit Netanel (1:05:46)
And what version did you ship your latest build from?

Yuri Sokolov (1:05:47)
and

Lior Hadashian (1:05:50)
2018

Yuri Sokolov (1:05:52)
2018. So basically when you release the game, that's when you froze the engine version.

Lior Hadashian (1:05:53)
Yeah.

Amit Netanel (1:05:53)
So as I need to.

Lior Hadashian (1:06:00)
actually, ⁓ when we released early access we stayed with 5.4, ⁓ we upgraded to 5.4, a great change ⁓ but once you have a game on production actually yeah, back then the time incrementing the Unity version was very big and also very scary today I'm much more confident the game won't break because I think the upgrade process became much more better in my opinion

Yuri Sokolov (1:06:11)
It was a big change at the time. It's like today. Like today? ⁓ I know a lot of companies, Amit can tell a little bit more about this probably from his personal recent experience, but I know a lot of companies that don't upgrade to Unity 6. I myself tried to upgrade in two mobile games, two long-running mobile games to Unity 6 and as always...

Amit Netanel (1:06:38)
Yeah, yeah, it's a...

Yuri Sokolov (1:06:57)
When you're upgrading the game, there are three things that's breaking. Your asset bundles, mostly the asset bundles that contains TextMesh Pro and shaders. Shaders break all the time, TextMesh Pro breaks all the time, asset bundles just multiplies the issue. mobile plugins is less of a...

Lior Hadashian (1:07:04)
Mm-hmm.

Amit Netanel (1:07:05)
Mm-hmm.

Lior Hadashian (1:07:11)
yeah, sick test. and mobile plugins, don't forget.

Amit Netanel (1:07:23)
Mobile plugins are often the reason you upgrade to begin with, because sometimes Apple and Google just demand you use a higher version from sometimes really good reasons. But sometimes it's just, you know, the version you're using is old, man. Get with the times. So it's usually, but it's a part of the pain of the process. You have to also upgrade not only your engine, but also your dependencies.

Lior Hadashian (1:07:28)
Hmm. Yeah Mm-hmm.

Amit Netanel (1:07:52)
which might not, if you're on the bleeding edge, they might not even be out yet, which is sometimes frustrating. But ⁓ usually the big players like Apps Flyer, Firebase, ⁓ or Middleware, or engines like FMOD, they usually come out within a week of the operating of the engine, if not even before. So it's not as bad as it was years ago. ⁓ But yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (1:07:57)
Mm-hmm.

Lior Hadashian (1:08:12)
nice.

Yuri Sokolov (1:08:15)
Mm-hmm. No, but then you have Google that's doing all kinds of weird stuff when we're talking about their plugins. They had a fun runaway, run down with Unity. So Unity said any plugin that is distributed through ⁓ UPM, Unity Package Manager, is not allowed.

Amit Netanel (1:08:45)
Mm-hmm. yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (1:08:50)
to track telemetry and basically analytics without user consent. So if you want to include in-editor tracking what user did and stuff, stuff like that, then you have to prompt him for consent. Google didn't like that. They're tracking and they don't want to ask permission for that. They're making analytics. They said, okay, we're not going to be on UPM. We're going to be in our own ⁓ zip file somewhere on our servers. Go download it. And then if you need to upgrade Google dependency today in Unity, it's usually the problematic one. So you need to download correct zip to replace things. And they made it easier. But then again, If there's a bug, they have a really strange development flow when they have all of their packages in the same project, in the same Unity project. when you bring in the packages, they're still in a package format. So they reference specific versions. say, okay, I have a dependency here and here and here. So sometimes you would take...

Amit Netanel (1:10:01)
Unity package.

Lior Hadashian (1:10:02)
Mmm.

Yuri Sokolov (1:10:20)
a package that passed all of their unit tests and it's compiling on their end. But then you bring in this package and it doesn't compile. Why? Because it's referencing a version of other package that is not being released. But on their end, it's all in the same project. So it's, it's working and you open it.

Lior Hadashian (1:10:39)
Bye. ⁓

Amit Netanel (1:10:40)
Yeah. So it's, it's the, it's, it's the worst version of DLL hell, right? It's not only that you need a, ⁓ a certain version, you need a certain version of the thing that wraps the version you need. Man.

Yuri Sokolov (1:10:45)
Yeah and then

Lior Hadashian (1:10:45)
It's good.

Yuri Sokolov (1:10:53)
Yeah, and then you open a PR for them to fix it. You fix it for them. And I still have a stock PR for two and a half years that they never responded to. So...

Lior Hadashian (1:10:57)
you

Amit Netanel (1:11:03)
Nice.

Lior Hadashian (1:11:07)
⁓ I didn't know you can actually open them in PR and ask them to...

Yuri Sokolov (1:11:10)
No, for those kind of things, yeah, for the open source plugins, yeah, you can easily, they have a lot of Firebase and stuff like this, you have the ability to open a PR.

Amit Netanel (1:11:21)
Yeah. That being said, I just this week upgraded our project, which runs for it's a 20-something people project running for four years. So lots of tech debt, lots of moving parts. And I upgraded us from 20.22.3 to 6.3 just this week. And it was OK. It was just OK.

Lior Hadashian (1:11:37)
you

Amit Netanel (1:11:48)
Like there was ⁓ automatic API changes. Some stuff was deprecated. Like for example, they deprecated polybrush, which we use for level design. And the biggest change I had to do is just to take something that was wrapped in a library, bring the code that's already open, open sourced, and change it myself. It was a breeze. And that's about it.

Yuri Sokolov (1:12:16)
So I have to say that you had it easy because your game wasn't in production. So you didn't have asset bundles that you can't recreate.

Amit Netanel (1:12:24)
⁓ No, no, no. OK, let me expand on that. Let me expand on that, my dear colleague. We do have a game in production. The game is on the Asset Store. I can't. It's even before I publish.

Yuri Sokolov (1:12:31)
Sure. Can we say the name of the game so people will download it? Because I really like it.

Amit Netanel (1:12:43)
Sure, yeah. I don't want to really go deep into it. You can ⁓ look up Swap Heroes in both Apple and Google Play. It's out now in most countries. We don't believe in ⁓ blocking it in countries it's not marketed on. It's not marketed in the entire world yet. And also, it's kind of a middle version. OK, we had ⁓ a journey. We'll talk about that when it's time for retrospect. I'm really proud of the product as it is now. So ⁓ download and give me a shout out if you enjoyed. And if you didn't enjoy, don't forget to call me a lazy developer in Google Play, because that's one of the first reviews we got. Bunch of lazy developers. ⁓ So we do have a production ⁓ site. And also,

Lior Hadashian (1:13:20)
I will.

Amit Netanel (1:13:35)
That's not the thing that worries me. The thing that worries because we have ⁓ forced update systems, and we have ⁓ our own internal asset bundles management system that allows us to say, ⁓ people are putting on that version. You ⁓ get this set of asset bundles, and people on higher version gets the updated bundles. you have to do it, because ⁓ Unity just won't. ⁓ support sometimes asset bundles that will build in a different version. Although ⁓ starting with Unity 6.1, I think, there's a way to make your asset bundles version agnostic. Basically, it's a flag you can use when you build asset bundles. ⁓ It won't help if, for example, as you mentioned, in TechSmash Pro, you utilize a property that doesn't exist in a previous version.

Lior Hadashian (1:14:18)
Hmm.

Amit Netanel (1:14:31)
But it also won't break stuff. So it's nice to have the option. And ⁓ yeah, I mean, we got it easy because ⁓ the way we handle this specific pane is so engineered. And we are actively working on it. There's not a week that passes by without abrogating just a bit.

Yuri Sokolov (1:14:45)
You can recreate all the bundles at the moment.

Amit Netanel (1:15:01)
of that system, make it bit easier. Move it from the editor to CI, CD. ⁓ In seven years, if we talk about this product in seven years, we're probably super successful. And I'm retired. And all my income is from only talking about that successful product I did. ⁓ Definitely, definitely.

Yuri Sokolov (1:15:03)
Let's talk in seven years.

Lior Hadashian (1:15:11)
Yeah. And then you are investing in me and Yuri to do our games

Yuri Sokolov (1:15:23)
Talking about this, Lior, what's next for you? the company is currently on a slow burner. Are you developing something new? You're working on something new?

Lior Hadashian (1:15:31)
Zombie fight, call it, yeah. I don't want to go in a big announcement or something, like you have a dear Ferris, yeah, I do work. ⁓ It's not actually just I, ⁓ me and my team working on a new game, but I really don't want to like lock in on the concept or ⁓ how do you say that? to guarantee some kind of a game. ⁓ Yes, I did have the fire burning in me and now I'm all ready to return to the indie scene, let's call it like this. And yes, me and my team are developing a new game. I hope once we have enough to show, we will be able to publicly talk about it.

Yuri Sokolov (1:16:19)
And now you're probably doing it in Godot.

Lior Hadashian (1:16:22)
No,

Amit Netanel (1:16:22)
Hmm?

Lior Hadashian (1:16:24)
Unreal 5, no, not really. I'm staying in my comfort zone in Unity 6.4, the bleeding edge of the technology,

Amit Netanel (1:16:26)
No, no, no, not really. ⁓ wow.

Yuri Sokolov (1:16:33)
on the bleeding edge, right?

Amit Netanel (1:16:34)
The guy from the future.

Yuri Sokolov (1:16:36)
Just today we had a conversation and one guy that's maintaining 13 years old games said, show me a person who's using Unity 6.3. And I said, all of my games, all of my projects are 6.4. They're not in production, but

Lior Hadashian (1:16:56)
Yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (1:16:57)
let me be a smart ass for once.

Lior Hadashian (1:17:00)
Now once you're in production you're very very scared to upgrade the engine because it's not about the bugs you found, it's about the bugs you didn't find

Yuri Sokolov (1:17:08)
That's right. So it was really nice talking to you. It was fun. I hope to bring you... Yeah, yeah. I hope bringing you in when you have something to show for your next title. It would be interesting. And it would be interesting to talk to you about how you approach this journey once again when you're starting it.

Lior Hadashian (1:17:14)
Same here, thank you very much.

Amit Netanel (1:17:15)
Yeah, and a long time in the making, by the way.

Lior Hadashian (1:17:18)
Hahaha Mm-hmm.

Yuri Sokolov (1:17:36)
from scratch we can say from scratch because you need to race with a lot of lessons that's yeah

Lior Hadashian (1:17:40)
but with lessons like from it's like a new game plus in like in games.

Amit Netanel (1:17:46)
Would you bring any tool from Warriors Rise to Glory to a new project, though? Any editor tools?

Lior Hadashian (1:17:52)
not as they

Yuri Sokolov (1:17:54)
Unity,

Lior Hadashian (1:17:57)
are, like, I'm having a lot of things like we did, I do build them from scratch. I won't copy paste them, I do know, like, whatever they're supposed to do, what they didn't do right, and doing it correctly this time. like, I'm bringing the 2.0 of them.

Amit Netanel (1:18:14)
Basically your brain is the product.

Yuri Sokolov (1:18:15)
it.

Lior Hadashian (1:18:16)
well, lessons are very very valuable I think but thank you very much both for having me we don't meet enough in real life I saw him last time like 3 years ago yes, 23 years his beard was black at the time

Yuri Sokolov (1:18:22)
Great. ⁓

Amit Netanel (1:18:31)
Yeah, Unite 2023. was a while. It was three years ago. Jeez, man. Wow. Yeah. Tough three years.

Lior Hadashian (1:18:44)
And yeah.

Yuri Sokolov (1:18:45)
I remember the days. I remember the days. My bird was also black. ⁓ It still is. So yeah, really was really great seeing you and talking to you and

Lior Hadashian (1:18:48)
Yeah, so thank you very much. Ha

Amit Netanel (1:19:02)
Catch you in the next one.

Lior Hadashian (1:19:03)
Yeah. Thank you very much. Also for our listeners. Thank you very much.

Amit Netanel (1:19:08)
You too.

Yuri Sokolov (1:19:08)
Yeah.