the video game industry is big there are
over 2 billion gamers on this planet so
video games appeals to everyone it’s not
just for teenage boys in their parents
basement anymore now this sort of
astronomical growth is fueled by
innovation the industry relies upon it
and to the casual observer it seems like
straight line growth but in reality
there’s a price of that success failure
lots and lots of failures now this is
something that people don’t talk about
that much and in big business this
particular F word is really really bad
but is it or is it the key to repeated
success my name is Karthik Bala and I’ve
been making video games for over 27
years and I’ve been fortunate enough to
have built and led teams that have
worked on some pretty popular games
including multi-billion dollar
franchises such as Guitar Hero and
Skylanders this sort of this sort of
gaming you know really came about over
the last 25 years when we started our
first company in our parents basement my
brother and I were in high school when
we started and you know it was amazing
to see that sort of growth over the
years and it started as a few friends as
a hobby and grew to a world-class game
development studio with over 200
professionals now part of Activision
Blizzard now we had some great successes
over the years but also some pretty
critical failures so it’s gonna take you
back to 1996 when we had our first game
synergist published but it wasn’t until
2001 with the launch of Tony Hawk for
the the launch of the Nintendo Game Boy
Advance that we had our first big
multi-million unit hit
and then in 2007 with Guitar Hero we had
never made a music rhythm game before
and were thrust into this new hot genre
Guitar Hero 3 was the first single video
game to make over a billion dollars in
revenue and then again in 2011
Skylanders brought this magic of
bringing toys to life
kids would buy these toys that they
would put on a magic portal and they
would come to life in the video game
that magic went on to sell over two
hundred and fifty million toys over the
next five years now and that’s one of
these successes that’s not all that
interesting let me talk to you about
some of my failures so between 96 and
2000 we made a bunch of games none of
them were breaking out and worse yet our
big publishing partner went bankrupt in
2000 and it was kind of partly our fault
you know we couldn’t get our games
either done on time or on budget or hit
the quality standards that that we were
trying to reach and my brother and I
were a couple years out of college and
we had to take on a personal bank loan
of a million dollars this was failure
number one big wake-up call we had to
get our act together the following year
we launched Tony Hawk on time to
critical acclaim and it’s our first big
hit that led to a series of successes
doing these small and medium-size games
we were leaders in portable gaming and
led to the opportunity of a lifetime to
work on spider-man 3 for the launch of
the movie in 2007 success seemed
inevitable turned out to be one of the
biggest failures of my career so first
failure partner went bankrupt
we had a rescue our own company second
failure
Spider Man 3 so what happened this
project was a massive undertaking it
required a really large team
unfortunately the way we worked for
doing small and medium sized projects
didn’t scale to make these big games now
we got the game done on time but it
certainly didn’t meet our quality
standards worse yet it burnt out the
team it really required us to reinvent
the way we operated the way we can make
games at a large scale and then came
Guitar Hero it required us to be agile
and really scrappy and innovative but
work cross-functionally is part of a
much larger organization to produce
millions and millions of guitars to be
able to meet the demand worldwide and
the music rhythm genre was on a tear we
thought it could be evergreen but
unfortunately by 2011 the interest and
the audience had really waned in the
category guitar hero is about wish
fulfillment
unleashing your inner rock star that
wish was granted for millions of
consumers and then they were done so
failure number three big lesson success
doesn’t last forever and with Skylanders
it also became a pop culture phenomenon
and it also proved that the magic
doesn’t last forever in an industry that
is driven by innovation and constant
change you can only hang on to your core
innovation for so long so you notice an
interesting pattern here some of the
biggest successes were preceded by
failures when we think about innovation
often times you know people think that
innovation goes to direct success but
more often than not it goes to failure
and then that requires you to reinvent
and try again and you’re often in this
loop this reinvention loop for a long
time now as long as you’re not doing the
same thing over and over again
I believe it eventually leads to success
now as I said earlier that success
doesn’t last forever and now you can
sure you can try and sustain it for a
period of time and you can do
incremental innovation to kind of keep
it going but it eventually decays and
leads back into the
failure state now this is a pretty
simple diagram and kind of obvious and
when you think about it in the context
of science or research this is pretty
expected but you put this in the context
of big business across a variety of
different industries and man you’re
trying to avoid failure at all costs in
fact there’s complete denial that
failure is even part of the process and
there’s a real fear of failing within
organizations so why is that you know
when I think about my kids going through
kindergarten and and elementary school
failing curiosity exploration this is
all encouraged and it’s a time of rapid
learning but by the time they get to
middle school in high school while
you’re trying to avoid that read F on
tests and and papers and that psychology
continues you know and as you grow and
and into the business world and in
business executives are not rewarded for
failures in fact failures are not a
badge of honor it’s it’s the plague and
in many organizations you’re politically
cooked if if you fail on a project and
that incentive avoiding failure and
minimizing risk-taking can permeate
throughout the culture of the rest of
the organization and when companies do
find success oftentimes most of the
investment goes to where sustaining and
just doing the same thing overnight once
again expecting success to last forever
instead of redirecting funds and
resources towards new innovation so what
can we do about that you know failure is
perhaps the single most important
teaching moment of your life but when
you put it in the context of business
it’s not thought that way so you know
maybe we can start with not marking it
with a big red F maybe we can change the
connotation into something more positive
where failure actually is the path to
reinvention and Phi
success and recognizing that success is
temporary and that you have to invest
against new ideas for the next great
success now just changing the color on
the PowerPoint it’s not going to fix
things it’s about creating the right
kind of culture within your organization
that recognizes that failure is the
price of success and that you create an
organization or system that can afford
to fail that can empower teams and allow
them to fail until they go through that
reinvention loop to find that success
creating a safe environment to do so and
then when you do find that success
invest against the new ideas that could
fail and you’ll try again but then it
leads to long term repeatable success so
this is actually what my brother and I
are trying to do now we have a new
startup called valence studios and it
required us to personally go through a
reinvention we had a let go of the
company that we had grown and built over
25 years to start over from scratch
valence studios the mission of the
company is to explore new forms of play
that inherently takes incredible
creative and technological risk to find
breakthrough ideas and that’s requiring
us to create a new kind of culture with
with folks talented folks who are
fearless and aspiring to fail every day
thank you
[Applause] [Music]
over 2 billion gamers on this planet so
video games appeals to everyone it’s not
just for teenage boys in their parents
basement anymore now this sort of
astronomical growth is fueled by
innovation the industry relies upon it
and to the casual observer it seems like
straight line growth but in reality
there’s a price of that success failure
lots and lots of failures now this is
something that people don’t talk about
that much and in big business this
particular F word is really really bad
but is it or is it the key to repeated
success my name is Karthik Bala and I’ve
been making video games for over 27
years and I’ve been fortunate enough to
have built and led teams that have
worked on some pretty popular games
including multi-billion dollar
franchises such as Guitar Hero and
Skylanders this sort of this sort of
gaming you know really came about over
the last 25 years when we started our
first company in our parents basement my
brother and I were in high school when
we started and you know it was amazing
to see that sort of growth over the
years and it started as a few friends as
a hobby and grew to a world-class game
development studio with over 200
professionals now part of Activision
Blizzard now we had some great successes
over the years but also some pretty
critical failures so it’s gonna take you
back to 1996 when we had our first game
synergist published but it wasn’t until
2001 with the launch of Tony Hawk for
the the launch of the Nintendo Game Boy
Advance that we had our first big
multi-million unit hit
and then in 2007 with Guitar Hero we had
never made a music rhythm game before
and were thrust into this new hot genre
Guitar Hero 3 was the first single video
game to make over a billion dollars in
revenue and then again in 2011
Skylanders brought this magic of
bringing toys to life
kids would buy these toys that they
would put on a magic portal and they
would come to life in the video game
that magic went on to sell over two
hundred and fifty million toys over the
next five years now and that’s one of
these successes that’s not all that
interesting let me talk to you about
some of my failures so between 96 and
2000 we made a bunch of games none of
them were breaking out and worse yet our
big publishing partner went bankrupt in
2000 and it was kind of partly our fault
you know we couldn’t get our games
either done on time or on budget or hit
the quality standards that that we were
trying to reach and my brother and I
were a couple years out of college and
we had to take on a personal bank loan
of a million dollars this was failure
number one big wake-up call we had to
get our act together the following year
we launched Tony Hawk on time to
critical acclaim and it’s our first big
hit that led to a series of successes
doing these small and medium-size games
we were leaders in portable gaming and
led to the opportunity of a lifetime to
work on spider-man 3 for the launch of
the movie in 2007 success seemed
inevitable turned out to be one of the
biggest failures of my career so first
failure partner went bankrupt
we had a rescue our own company second
failure
Spider Man 3 so what happened this
project was a massive undertaking it
required a really large team
unfortunately the way we worked for
doing small and medium sized projects
didn’t scale to make these big games now
we got the game done on time but it
certainly didn’t meet our quality
standards worse yet it burnt out the
team it really required us to reinvent
the way we operated the way we can make
games at a large scale and then came
Guitar Hero it required us to be agile
and really scrappy and innovative but
work cross-functionally is part of a
much larger organization to produce
millions and millions of guitars to be
able to meet the demand worldwide and
the music rhythm genre was on a tear we
thought it could be evergreen but
unfortunately by 2011 the interest and
the audience had really waned in the
category guitar hero is about wish
fulfillment
unleashing your inner rock star that
wish was granted for millions of
consumers and then they were done so
failure number three big lesson success
doesn’t last forever and with Skylanders
it also became a pop culture phenomenon
and it also proved that the magic
doesn’t last forever in an industry that
is driven by innovation and constant
change you can only hang on to your core
innovation for so long so you notice an
interesting pattern here some of the
biggest successes were preceded by
failures when we think about innovation
often times you know people think that
innovation goes to direct success but
more often than not it goes to failure
and then that requires you to reinvent
and try again and you’re often in this
loop this reinvention loop for a long
time now as long as you’re not doing the
same thing over and over again
I believe it eventually leads to success
now as I said earlier that success
doesn’t last forever and now you can
sure you can try and sustain it for a
period of time and you can do
incremental innovation to kind of keep
it going but it eventually decays and
leads back into the
failure state now this is a pretty
simple diagram and kind of obvious and
when you think about it in the context
of science or research this is pretty
expected but you put this in the context
of big business across a variety of
different industries and man you’re
trying to avoid failure at all costs in
fact there’s complete denial that
failure is even part of the process and
there’s a real fear of failing within
organizations so why is that you know
when I think about my kids going through
kindergarten and and elementary school
failing curiosity exploration this is
all encouraged and it’s a time of rapid
learning but by the time they get to
middle school in high school while
you’re trying to avoid that read F on
tests and and papers and that psychology
continues you know and as you grow and
and into the business world and in
business executives are not rewarded for
failures in fact failures are not a
badge of honor it’s it’s the plague and
in many organizations you’re politically
cooked if if you fail on a project and
that incentive avoiding failure and
minimizing risk-taking can permeate
throughout the culture of the rest of
the organization and when companies do
find success oftentimes most of the
investment goes to where sustaining and
just doing the same thing overnight once
again expecting success to last forever
instead of redirecting funds and
resources towards new innovation so what
can we do about that you know failure is
perhaps the single most important
teaching moment of your life but when
you put it in the context of business
it’s not thought that way so you know
maybe we can start with not marking it
with a big red F maybe we can change the
connotation into something more positive
where failure actually is the path to
reinvention and Phi
success and recognizing that success is
temporary and that you have to invest
against new ideas for the next great
success now just changing the color on
the PowerPoint it’s not going to fix
things it’s about creating the right
kind of culture within your organization
that recognizes that failure is the
price of success and that you create an
organization or system that can afford
to fail that can empower teams and allow
them to fail until they go through that
reinvention loop to find that success
creating a safe environment to do so and
then when you do find that success
invest against the new ideas that could
fail and you’ll try again but then it
leads to long term repeatable success so
this is actually what my brother and I
are trying to do now we have a new
startup called valence studios and it
required us to personally go through a
reinvention we had a let go of the
company that we had grown and built over
25 years to start over from scratch
valence studios the mission of the
company is to explore new forms of play
that inherently takes incredible
creative and technological risk to find
breakthrough ideas and that’s requiring
us to create a new kind of culture with
with folks talented folks who are
fearless and aspiring to fail every day
thank you
[Applause] [Music]
Please follow and like us: