Speaker A
Hello everyone. Welcome this nice evening. Thank you for coming to a talk at 7 PM, which, uh, is challenging logistically for a lot of you. Let's get through it, and then we can party. How's your JC going so far?
Łukasz Hacura discusses reinventing Unshare Studios and reimagining the Painkiller IP into a co-op shooter, sharing lessons from growth and challenges.
Key Takeaways
- Transitioning to larger-scale double-A projects requires significant organizational change and learning.
- Creative direction and technical clarity are critical to avoid costly reworks during development.
- Working with established IPs involves balancing fan expectations with innovation.
- Phased development approaches, including ideation, help manage complex game projects.
- Lessons from Painkiller's development will shape Unshare Studios' future projects and workflows.
What the video covers
- Łukasz Hacura shares the story of how Unshare Studios transitioned from RPGs and smaller projects to developing a double-A co-op shooter reboot of Painkiller.
- The Painkiller reboot is described as a 'movement co-op shooter,' blending elements of Doom and Vermintide with a fresh creative direction.
- The studio grew significantly from 80 to 220 employees, with the Painkiller team reaching 100 people, requiring major organizational and development process changes.
- Hacura discusses the shift from traditional pre-production and production phases to a more nuanced, phased approach including ideation and ongoing development.
- Challenges included managing creative direction, technical development, and coordination across large teams unfamiliar with first-person shooters.
- The game received mixed reviews, with criticism mainly from fans expecting a classic Painkiller experience, and sales were lower than hoped.
- Despite the reception, the talk focuses on the studio's growth, learning, and adaptation rather than a project postmortem.
- Hacura highlights the importance of working with publishers, IP approvals, and adapting to new workflows in double-A game development.
- The talk also touches on the difficulties of specialization, leadership roles, and the evolving nature of game development in larger teams.
- Unshare Studios aims to apply lessons learned from Painkiller to future projects to improve quality and efficiency.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction and Context
- 03:31About Unshare Studios and Painkiller 2025
- 07:23Studio Growth and Organizational Changes
- 10:26Challenges in Pre-production and Development
- 13:22Team Specialization and Leadership
- 19:01Publisher Relations and IP Management
- 24:42Post-launch Reflections and Future Plans
- 29:03Concluding Thoughts and Q&A
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
[snorts] Same as mine. Okay. Okay. So, uh, reinventing a studio while reimagining Painkiller. So, I'm trying a new thing in this talk.
Speaker A
I'm going to start with a story. So, five years ago, Saber Interactive approached us. We were cooperating then on a port of Darksiders 3 for Switch, and they said, "Hey, you know, Embracer is investing a lot into different studios and different IPs, and
Speaker A
they want to create a lot of games to make their business model sustainable. No spoilers." Um, and, um, they said, "Hey, we had a lot of success with co-op shooter games like World War Z.
Speaker A
You're a Polish developer, right? Like Painkiller is a Polish IP." So, yeah, [snorts] uh, that was that was the market research part. Um, and, uh, and I came to the top management of my company, to the heads of
Speaker A
the departments, and I know it's going to be a hard sell. It's like, hey, we're just doing an RPG. We just started cooperation with Laurian.
Speaker A
Should we make a first-person shooter? Uh, on a Painkiller IP, which is more like a People Can Fly, Flying Wild Hog kind of a thing, is it Unshare Studios kind of a thing, right? So, and it was the middle of
Speaker A
COVID because it's November 2020, so it's a lockdown. So, I used an application that kind of a planning poker kind of a thing, and I asked my heads, is like, hey, should we? It's anonymous. Can we pull it off? Does it make sense
Speaker A
like for us to? No, I think the exact phrasing was, will we pull it off? Are we prepared to create a first-person co-op shooter?
Speaker A
And the almost unanimous answer was 1 to 10 was like three if I remember correctly. It's like, we are not prepared to create a first-person shooter. My second question was, but should we do it?
Speaker A
And that, if I remember correctly, was around eight out of 10, right? [laughter] So, I was like, okay, I don't need to sell it that much, right? Because I really, I thought that this is, this is going to put us on the double-A space,
Speaker A
right? We're playing more in the indie premium league, and this is okay. It's a shooter. We don't have experience in shooters, but this is going to put us on the map as a proper double-A studio.
Speaker A
And this is, I think, why we should do it. So, uh, my name is Lucas Atsura. I've been around, um, the industry for almost two decades. And, um, I'm a CEO at Unshare Studios, who is a PC and console premium double
Speaker A
AAA video game developer who almost exclusively works for publishers on their IPs. Um, and what is 2025 Painkiller?
Speaker A
So, first of all, it's something that we are calling, uh, movement co-op shooter. So, our like internal creative direction pitch, it's a double-A Doom but with co-op and with Vermintide meta gameplay loop.
Speaker A
But we have even better description. One of the some positive reviews on Steam, um, said, "Hey, it's Daddy Doom and Mommy Vermintide." Named it after Uncle Pancular.
Speaker A
The kid doesn't resemble the uncle, but it's a nice kid. Uh, and I enjoy his company. So, uh, I think that's the best creative direction. I, yes, that person understood what we were trying to accomplish.
Speaker A
Uh, it's a reboot, not a remake. So, it's a new take, uh, of Painkiller made by, uh, People Can Fly back in 2004, which was one of the first really big, um, um, Polish video game successes abroad, right?
Speaker A
Uh, it's made with UE4 despite some people saying it looks like generic UE5. Uh, and it's published by Saber under 3D Realms brand, and it's developed by us, and it launched on October 21st, and you can play it at PGA in Hall 5 if you want
Speaker A
to. So, a short trailer just to showcase if anybody doesn't know what the game is about. That's the announcement trailer back from March.
Speaker A
Sound, please. Sound. Heat. Heat. So, uh, let's set a tone for this talk.
Speaker A
So, CAD is out of the bag. Reception of the game is not great. Uh, we have mixed on Steam, although most of the negative reviews are about the fact that it's not an OG Painkiller game, that it's
Speaker A
a reboot, reimagining. It's this Vermintide U kind of a creative direction. We are quite well received on consoles where there are apparently fewer OG Painkiller fans.
Speaker A
But the problem is actually not, uh, um, not the reception from the review point of view but very low amount of sales that also translate that there is evidently some kind of a problem, um, with the game. The good news is
Speaker A
this talk is not a project postmortem. Okay, this is not my story to tell.
Speaker A
[snorts] Uh, I think that there will be, uh, there will be probably more talks coming from, uh, um, from other people in coming months and years, uh, about this. What I'm trying to, uh, convey during this talk is
Speaker A
how much we as a studio changed on the strong, um, and a lot of that change came from the last five years, came from the fact that we're developing Painkiller and what kind of struggles we had as an organization
Speaker A
because of Painkiller development and how we hopefully grew and learned and hopefully we won't make, uh, we won't, we'll have other problems and other mistakes in, um, our future
Speaker A
projects. So, for context, just before starting Pancular in October 2025, 2020, we were after two VR games, we did a little bit of codev, and our biggest title to date was Observer, um, Observer System Red X, which was a
Speaker A
remaster of Observer by Bloober Team, which was a launch title for, uh, back then next generation of consoles on PS5s and XSX. X and, and we are also working on DLCs for, uh, Lion for Divinity Johnson 2. So,
Speaker A
our headcount back then was around 80, and our biggest teams were around 30 people, right? So, I think in peak maybe we had 40 for like a second on Observer, but I think with the core team was around 30 for most of the
Speaker A
production of that remaster. And, uh, if you fast forward right now to October 2025, there were some games that we worked on or helped as a codev studio on some other titles. We released Game Deck. Uh, we released Liars of Fear,
Speaker A
which was a remake of Liars of Fear 1 and 2 for Bloober Team, and we helped on some additional titles, but our headcount right now is 220.
Speaker A
And our biggest team was around 100 people, and that was the Painkiller team. And believe me, creating a game with 30 people is drastically different than creating a game with 100 people. And because of that, we needed to learn and
Speaker A
change a lot of things inside the company. And this is the gist of the talk. So, I'm going to talk about a couple of points. I'm going to go as deep as I can inside this, um, 50-minute
Speaker A
formula of a talk. I'll be available also for questions and maybe I will do some deep dives in the future on some of those topics. So, the first thing I want to say is that I already touched
Speaker A
upon a little bit in the past in my talks is face-based development. And what do I mean by face-based development is that I'm sure that many times when you, uh, when we were in the middle of production, everybody
Speaker A
complained is like, hey, we keep reworking that, we keep adding features. We don't know where our creative direction is actually going. We keep changing stuff.
Speaker A
There are a lot of people who are, uh, who don't know what to exactly do.
Speaker A
We're burning money, and everybody says, ah, it's because we had lousy pre-production, or they say, ah, because we didn't have pre-production.
Speaker A
Right? So, for many years, and maybe I'm a dinosaur in game dev, but for many years it was like there's pre-production, there's production. There's like two phases of where you create the game. You prepare to create a game and then you
Speaker A
create a game. Well, the paradigm, as I understand, had changed a little bit. So, right now you can hear more and more from other studios and at Unshare Studios also that we differentiate more phases, right? First of all, we differentiate that production
Speaker A
is first you need to figure out what you're doing. And we're calling that one ideation, right? And then you're figuring out how you're going to do it.
Speaker A
And we call this one a pre-production. And actually the difference b
Speaker A
this. And um we struggled with this a lot in signed painkiller because first of all if I remember the road map correctly and I looked at it yesterday so I think I am if I remember the road map correctly we
Speaker A
had like a three months of ideiation but the thing with but the thing is that we didn't understood what ideation is back then and our ideation was actually doing paper design actually when I looked at the when I looked at the
Speaker A
speech that was here before it's like, "Oh, we did that. That didn't work." Uh, it's like first you plan what you want to do. I mean, first you figure what you want to do, then you plan, and then you
Speaker A
just do it, right? Uh, so that didn't work for us because, uh, we figured out some things on paper. It was approved by the publisher, but then we immediately moved to pre-production and we were stuck in, hey, the tech people want to
Speaker A
do systems, texts, and features. And the gameplay people are trying to find what the heck the game is about, and they need quick turnaround, quick iterations, dirty prototypes, and those people are at odds with each other, right? because
Speaker A
one is trying to create a game and the other is trying to figure out what the game is and those are vastly different objectives and I I'm surprised to say that this is something that uh companies many companies I talked to struggle to
Speaker A
this day. you have this um you have this like odds of technical and creative people that are at odds with each other because technical people want to be included as soon as possible on the project because the creative people are going to
Speaker A
[ __ ] it up, right? They're going to create something that it's it's impossible to deliver upon, right? So, and you're like, "Yeah, that makes sense." So, you include highly technical people. You include them as early as possible. And then they're going to the
Speaker A
designers and saying, "Okay, what game are we creating because I need to create tech for it?" And the designers like, "I don't know." It's like, "Ah, [ __ ] this company." Right? It's like, "What are we even doing here?" So, um,
Speaker A
so this is why you need to have a drastically different mental state when you're when you're figuring what type of game you're doing and you're figuring out um how you're going to do it. And that's why right now in our projects,
Speaker A
and I'm not saying we're great at it, but we're much better than we were five years ago, is we're trying to clearly differentiate time for, hey, this is quick, dirty prototypes time. Don't build architecture. Most of it's going
Speaker A
to go to the trash. We're trying to figure out the core gameplay loop. Then we're going to build the game.
Speaker A
The problem is that we are a work for hire company. What does it mean? We are creating full cycle games like many other developers that are working with publishers, but the difference is we're getting paid from day one. And while
Speaker A
it's great for a developer risk-wise, what is a minus we need a milestone plan day one. So what does that mean is that we have no idea what type of game we're creating other than yes, we're creating a shooter, co-op, couple of
Speaker A
hours gameplay, this type of stuff. But we need to put something actually in the milestone plan right for the next couple of years before we actually do the ideation which is crazy.
Speaker A
But this is how this industry works. Uh the publisher is not going to pay for promise that you're going to figure it out at one point, right? Uh when in a normal publishing model, you're usually after that hump. You usually have like a
Speaker A
prototype or a vertical slice. So you're derisking it a little bit. Now you can actually plan how to deliver on a game.
Speaker A
In our case, it's not. So, so what we are trying to do right now and actually more and more publishers that we work with accept that model is we're trying to sign proof of concept phase before we sign the whole game. So, we actually try
Speaker A
to get to separate the agreements for different phases. Uh it comes with its own set of challenges. Uh but you know anybody who signed any agreement with a publisher know that they can cancel basically risk-f free most of the time.
Speaker A
So what is the real benefit for a developer to sign an entire game when a publisher can cancel it at any moment if they want to. So actually signing it in phases, we're protecting ourselves because every time we sign a new phase,
Speaker A
we know much more and we can be better at negotiating a sensible milestone plan.
Speaker A
So yeah, that didn't happen at Painkiller. We we learned that the hard way. Um, another thing is is that while I do agree that you need a certain amount of uh technical ability in ideiation because yes, sometimes you can have
Speaker A
crazy ideas that should be shut down immediately. Uh, you need a different mindset when you're blue sky thinking about what type of a game you want to create. So, while you do want to have creative people, you don't want to have
Speaker A
like architects there, right? You don't want to have people that are building things the proper way. You you need to have yes technical people there but who are fine with working fast and dirty. So even though usually you want to have the
Speaker A
core team, you don't want to switch the teams between the phases moving from ideiation to uh pre-production and then to production.
Speaker A
You need to be mindful of that. you need to change the mindset, right? That you are actually doing different things in those phases and it's in my experience very difficult. And to this day, even though we are much more aware about this
Speaker A
problem, we have a problem with that. So, and then from my experience, most of games in Poland end when the budget ends, right? So, it's like, oh, we finish all the content launch, right?
Speaker A
Um, but that's not where quality is created. uh the quality is created in a phase that it's usually called post-production when you actually okay we finished all the content we have all the features now we have some time to
Speaker A
give the love and that's where the magic happens when you're working on the actual metacritics right um of the of the game and you can have a vastly different uh metacritic or quality outcome depending of if you have this
Speaker A
post-prouction or not I'm going to talk it a little bit later why we theoretically had post-production, meaning that we theoretically finished all the content of the game a year prior to the actual launch of the game.
Speaker A
But the problem is that we are also, yes, we had the content, but we are still adding features. So, if you played the game or if you or if you heard about uh Pankular, we have a pretty robust and
Speaker A
pretty big weapon upgrade systems with uh with weapon synergies and stuff. Most of that was created in the last year of development, right? So it was kind of production thing right while the rest of the content was actually supposedly
Speaker A
um um could have been polished but because of other things that I'm going to tell also in the other part of the presentation we were trying to trim as much of stuff of as possible uh to lower the cost uh of the so if content was
Speaker A
complete okay all the artists out of the projects like all the 3D artists, all the environmental artists, character artists, whoever is not super essential to deliver on the game out. The problem is if you if you throw out most of the
Speaker A
specialization, content creation specialization out of the project, suddenly yeah, you might be in a post production, but there are no people left to actually polish the game, right?
Speaker A
There are only people who are squashing the bugs and maybe adding features. So right now in general the takeaway for us right now in the projects that we're doing is there we are much more mindful about do we have enough people to
Speaker A
actually move from face to face and because there are a lot of unure studios people here and they're like thinking well I know at least of one project that well yeah it's not always work but we're mindful of that.
Speaker A
Um on that topic I strongly recommend play for production process which uh uh delves more deeply in the whole ideation process. One of the best production books out there I recommended it already many times. Um last year or this year
Speaker A
last year last year last year I made a talk buffer is a lie which I think is uh um there are segments about face- based development there which I think go more in depth here than I did so far but if
Speaker A
you just can watch after this talk one thing please go watch Mark Cerny method it's a dice speech from 2002 and it's still valid today unfortunately ly the industry doesn't learn. Um okay structural evolution. So I mentioned that
Speaker A
uh I mentioned that we had maximum amount around 30 people before painkiller. So we were organized mostly around departments like most small studios you have okay artist sits here designer sits there there are programmers there's like one producer
Speaker A
and and and and couple of QAs right and a lot of planning a lot of staffing a lot of um organization around how we work how we actually produce this thing is going around departments right and it's department centered And if the
Speaker A
department is growing bigger, we have a lead of the department and then the leads coordinate between each other and talk to production and talk to the directors and and try to figure out what type of game we're doing. The problem
Speaker A
with this approach is it's absolutely not scaling. It's not scaling and it doesn't work in bigger teams. Once you hit that 50 plus, 60 plus, 70 plus, 110 I think was the peak at painkiller. You cannot have okay there are 20
Speaker A
programmers there and there are 20 designers there and somehow magically they need to communicate to each other right doesn't work. So most of the industry in the bigger um in in bigger uh on bigger projects are creating multi-disiplinary teams right um which
Speaker A
sometimes are called areas. is like, hey, this is a combat team, this is enemies team, this is the world team, and this is a quest design team or whatever. Uh, depending on the genre, you slice the game differently, but you
Speaker A
create multispecialization teams. And during production of painkiller, we actually introduced this as a new thing inside the studio, but we introduced this kind of halfway, meaning we did have multi-disiplinary teams, but we still had department leads that communicated to each other. And because
Speaker A
the department lead was usually tied to a single multispecialization teams and we didn't have like I don't know, five lead programmers, there was one lead programmer right?
Speaker A
That was crazy for the department leads and they were running around between like seven teams and trying to coordinate with other teams. Are we on track etc. And was and we already knew we saw it in painkiller is like okay
Speaker A
this is not sustainable on the next projects we need to create different type of roles and we need to disseminate information differently which I'm going to show in a second on a on a chart.
Speaker A
Uh, another thing is in some companies those multisspecialization teams are called strike teams. I personally don't like that word because strike team has uh ingrained in itself in the wording there's like temporarity into it right it's like hey we're we're just creating
Speaker A
a feature and then we're moving on we're disbanding this team and we're creating a new team. when when we are creating multipization feature or area teams, we try it to be at least for a phase right of development. Um,
Speaker A
another problem with scale is how to disseminate creative direction. If you have a very small team, if you have couple of designers, you have one creative director, creative director can look at every single task, they can look at every single developer, they can look
Speaker A
at every single deliverable and they get give their feedback. one-on-one or to the whole team and it makes sense and it's uh and can be very twooint but boots on the grounds right once you have multiple multispecialization teams this
Speaker A
is impossible so suddenly a creative director's role changes and this is also a skill that we needed to learn and I think we're still learning it on other projects but at least we know where we need to end up with this is that you're
Speaker A
trying to work on a some kind of a framework work on a creative direction, be it pillars, creative box, whatever else you as a director try to say, okay, this is what we try to accomplish. But the combat team needs to translate it to
Speaker A
their context. If in this creative direction, what does the combat mean or in this creative direction, what does the world creation mean? And the team leader or area leader which we then call also like area directors like for
Speaker A
example combat director or world director they are responsible to actually translate the the whole game creative direction and dissect it and put it into mouths of the of the team and the word ownership gets thrown a lot a lot and that's I also see as a
Speaker A
contextion point everybody has a different uh different definition of ownership. It's like, oh, if you're micromanaging, you're taking my ownership versus if I don't tell you what to do, you need to have your ownership, but I don't need know what
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I'm supposed to do because the frame is not defined well, etc. But making sure that everybody has enough context to actually take ownership of their own specialtity and make decisions, not just be a drone that actually just creates an asset or or or
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or codes a feature is I think one of the biggest challenge of the double A's because in aaa uh when you have deep specialization and very big teams you can go on the lowest level you can actually you you cannot
Speaker A
even deliver a context to everybody. You just say do this model, right? The problem is that in double A space where we're kind of not indie but not AAA, everybody still needs to know what type of game we're creating and they need to
Speaker A
have a broader view uh than just their specialization which is easy on a small indie team and that's kind of like expected but on a bigger company in a bigger team composition it's getting really hard and also as a director
Speaker A
suddenly you should work on a higher level of artifacts like as a art director you shouldn't like I don't know feedback a barrel like I don't like the color of this barrel the problem is that you don't necessarily even know if that
Speaker A
barrel in what lightning in what place is it even seen well on a scene doesn't make any sense for you to feed back a barrel okay you can feed back a scene that is already lit that has already has
Speaker A
is already set up and you're feedbacking that scene and saying okay this doesn't work for me because this, this, and this. Then everybody else tried to dissect it to their uh to their context.
Speaker A
But this is a learned skill. We sucked at it. I think we kind of still do suck at it. Uh but this is something that we're trying to actively learn, actively workshop, and actively teach our directors and our leads. And our current
Speaker A
structure looks, I don't know if it's uh visible here. I think it's not that bad.
Speaker A
Our current structure uh that came out of the knowhow from painkiller but is actually a new structure that we are using in in our new projects looks like this and it's modeled around also a lot of talks that we had with other
Speaker A
companies. So it's pretty similar to what's happening at CD Project Red right now. That's what's happening at Flying World Hog that is happening at Fool's Theory. Every company of course has their own quirks and their own context and it's not like onetoone but we see it
Speaker A
as a new friend uh trend in the even in the Polish industry because in the west actually it's something that was happening for years now. So how it's set up, you have department heads and managers that are like direct um direct
Speaker A
managers of the specialtities in the departments are outside the project, right? That makes sense obviously for us because we're are a studio that does multiple projects. If you would do one single project, you would obviously incorporate the heads inside of the
Speaker A
project. But once we do like three, four, five, seven projects at a time, uh the department heads are outside of the project and managing the department.
Speaker A
Same with managers. Uh then you have your executive producer. So a person that is responsible for the delivery of the project for the budget for the content with the publisher and making sure this delivers on time and on
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budget. And then you have your creative director supported by art director who are responsible for what type of a game we're doing for the quality for the creative vision.
Speaker A
And then depending on the genre and that one is uh very contextwise depending on the genre you cut your game into areas.
Speaker A
If your team is smaller you can skip that and go directly into multi-disciplinary teams. But if for example you have a 100 people team, you have a bigger bigger area like combat for example that can then be dissected
Speaker A
into okay there's a combat area with a combat director and then you have your enemies your weapons something else right and you have multispecialization teams under a single area and inside that multispecialization team you have a team leader usually a producer and bunch
Speaker A
of multispecialization developers that are responsible at delivering features and systems and content inside that uh mandate and we are right now doing that on uh one project for a couple of months now implementing that and we're implementing it in another project and it's a pain
Speaker A
point so I'm sure that in around I don't know next GC maybe two GC's from now I'm going to tell you how it went uh but this is what we're doing right now.
Speaker A
Another thing that came out from um from painkiller is a lot of projects that we did before we did with either uh Polish developers which people are different but the let's say the culture corration inside Poland is if you're Polish is simpler right uh but
Speaker A
we're starting to have more and more uh partners from other countries and other cultures and Saber was uh as an entity culturally is kind of difficult because if you think about if you look at Wikipedia Saber was co-founded by bunch
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of Russians and one Americans that immigrated to United States 25 years ago they're now American citizens and then uh most of the development was done in St. Petersburg and in Russia, but they also employed some Americans in Texas
Speaker A
and they were all owned by Embracer, which is a Swedish investment fund, right? Or investment vehicle.
Speaker A
And there is a very different cultural vibe between east and west, how you communicate, how you come to kierarchy to uh to management. And um I'll give you an example. We were negotiating a new project with Embracer at the time and we were talking to our
Speaker A
Russian Bisdev counterpart who told us, "Yeah, yeah, the project is dead. It it get cancelled. It's not going to happen." Well, thanks for the information for thanks for the heads up.
Speaker A
But at the same time, an American Bisdev counterpart is um writing to me and they're like, "You know what? There are some concerns around the project.
Speaker A
the temperature has decreased a little bit around the project like yeah I know it got cancelceled and they're like okay you know so that's one example another example is uh I was on a call and I have been dealing
Speaker A
with Americans for quite a bit now I got my experience with with bisdev on that side and I'm on a call with some of my people and they're giving us feedback and they're saying stuff like whoa this is amazing, this is great, this is
Speaker A
super, this is awesome. And they're very positive, very energetic. And they're just saying, "Yeah, I just have there's this little bit problem with this thing.
Speaker A
If you could fix that, that would be great. But by the way, awesome, great." And that was the end of the call. And my team was like, "Oh, awesome. They really liked it." Like, "No, they didn't.
Speaker A
They just told you if you're not going to change that thing, they're going to [ __ ] us up." That's what they told.
Speaker A
Clear in plain English, right? It's just their way of communicating. And so this was also an acquired skill that we needed to learn. And a lot of communication that in a smaller company was 100% on me. Suddenly was on an
Speaker A
executive producer on a creative produc on a creative director and suddenly we needed all of us we needed to learn to work with different cultures uh with different communication styles.
Speaker A
And anybody who talks to a Russian and then to an American knows what I'm talking about. Different management styles, right? Polish are rebels.
Speaker A
Nobody's going to tell us what we're going to do. Like we're very anti-urarchical actually. Russians very hierarchical, for example.
Speaker A
And to add to all of that, in 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine and it came a little bit awkward with on the calls, especially with the fact that a lot of Russians from St. Petersburg that we're working we're moving to
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Armenia and and starting Saber Yeravan right and at the time we are helping Fractured Bite which was an Embracerowned under Saber Ukraine studio.
Speaker A
So what I'm saying is read this book Culture Map. It's a really good book.
Speaker A
right now I I cannot unfortunately publicly say to who but we're right now for example watching uh working with a Japanese publisher.
Speaker A
So just like a freebie I also really recommend this book. Uh it really helped me to to to communicate better with Japanese. But long story short uh you know that number one reason of most of the fuckups in the
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game industry is communication, right? And it it re uh it's exponentially worse if you're working in a cross-cultural multil- language team that not everybody for example speaks good English. So uh this is something that uh we are mind
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very much mindful now in the new project. Another thing is and the context for that is also I'm going to say in a second why it was so super important painkiller but because and maybe that's unique to studios but I think that
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everybody that works in phases and has in-house content creators that doesn't use outsource has a problem with the fact then different phases you need different amount of people and then you got some people on the bench they need
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to do something right and you can either I don't know fire them and you can give them some R&D work and you can start another project. The problem is that usually you don't want to start a new project with the people that you don't
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need anymore in production. You actually want to start a project with the core team of the project you're working on right now. So that's complicated.
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And in a couple of hundred people company suddenly we realize that actually managing transfers and doing them intelligently and doing them optimally or at least trying to do them optimally is super difficult. So uh we put a lot of effort into managing our
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bench and projecting in cash flow wise. There are a lot of tools in in in PowerBI around that. Um we are really trying to be very well informed what the project needs. Obviously again there are some people at my company who are saying
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well we are saying that we need a technical artist for six months now and they're not there but we know that uh couple of years back we wouldn't even know it and now there's a system. Uh I'm sorry it's late. Uh so so there's a
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lot of effort inside our company logistically to handle that. Um we bu build a lot of custom pipelines around it. We have transfer meetings every week. Uh we have requisition and transfer sheets. Um we have bench warnings so every head sees that oh in
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six months this person is uh not allocated to any other project. And uh it's all connected to our controlling.
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So we exactly know how much money we're spending on which project and um and how does our current project outline um affects our cash flow and a lot of that was explained very nicely to go more in depth on a speech by our head of
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production our CFO Magda Nagatada. Uh unfortunately as of today this speech is not live yet but I suspect that in a couple of weeks slash months it's going to be live. Make a note of it.
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Uh, another thing that definitely affected both the company and uh, and painkiller was the industry turmoil, right? Because during that five years, as we know, [ __ ] hit the fan, right? And it started with our publisher.
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So, in May 2023, Embracer, the the the Saudi deal fell apart, as you probably know or heard about. So it was a $2 billion publishing deal that did not went through and uh suddenly a lot of projects including the one I
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mentioned that the temperature has decreased around it. uh a lot of projects get cancelled and uh all industry went into crisis mode right and actually from my perspective we haven't exited this mentality even today right so this is how the
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industry works right now but I don't want to make this talk about the industry crisis and the reasons about the crisis etc there were thousand words said about it uh also by me there's a there's a defam speech where I summarize
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my thoughts about it. Uh so you can go and check it out. But at one point Samberter exited Embracer and the problem is that Painkiller is a play on owned IP and Playon stayed at Embracer. So for uh for
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some time we weren't even sure if we're making Painkiller or if you're getting cancelled or we removing IP from the game. Uh so that wasn't fun on the team and it lasted around a year I think year and a half. Um
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and we were facing a lot of pressure to uh to release the game as soon as possible in 2024.
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uh because uh whole industry was derisking everybody had cash flow problems multiple of projects canled and we were under serious threat of okay painkiller can be cancelled actually at any moment. Uh and the only thing how we can increase
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our chances of not getting pan cancel canceled is increase our efforts on releasing as soon as possible because obviously if your uh your time to market is quick usually the decision is to keep the project maybe it's going to earn
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some money right uh sen cost policy is much stronger if it's close to release uh but the thing is we descaled the team a lot so there you go with the handling the transfer and the problems and the
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post-p production but with no people to actually do the post-production is because we decreased the team very drastically by maybe not by half but two I think from 110 pretty drastically to around 17 70 65 something like that
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but then our savior came space marine 2 somebody played this is an actual scene where a savior comes saves the day um but uh space marine two sold immensely well and Saber silently was like well why are we not going to make this
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game better I think we can do better than this and suddenly we had more time we had postp production we but we the people well so uh the next year uh we tried to u we worked uh together with with Saber we suddenly
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like usually the the when the project is close to um to completion. The eye of the Sauron is on you. So there was a lot of iteration directly with Saber creative team which was mostly uh XID guys. Uh you can see some some vibe of
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the Doom um also coming out from that. But what I'm trying to say here is that a lot of studios during that time bankrupt got closed down, bankrupted or had mass layoffs for a huge period of production of
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painkiller. And this is not on the painkillers team. This is on me. This is onure studios is for the lot of that time. There was such a huge immense pressure on us to not to have mass layoffs, not to go bankrupt but to
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survive. Basically, this is not a very good creative environment for for the team to be in and a position to be in, right? When you're when you're fighting for your studio survival and the cash flow is very important and uh the fact
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that you have a person or not have a person to do something is less important.
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Um so we were very fortunate to to actually deliver on it without those mass layouts.
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Another thing is working on an existing IP. As I mentioned, Painkiller is a publisherowned IP. Play on owns painkiller. So, Embracer technically owns Painkiller or Middle Earth and Friends or whatever they're called right now. Uh, but the thing is that there was
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no IP champion on the publisher side, right? There was no people can ex people can fly person that for example was part of painkiller that was gatekeeping us not to spoil this and we have a lot of experience right now working with um
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with IP holders and it usually works very differently which I will mention in a second. So very late in the game actually we announced the game six months before release mostly because the industry turmoil we didn't know if we
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have the IP etc etc so it was pushed back to as late as possible to announced uh we announced it in March and immediately came out of like okay so the market research was COP and World War Z
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sold well uh and now suddenly people are like during a closed beta test or most importantly even doing the demo they were like well this is not the painkiller I did absolutely nothing for uh so I don't like this um and the thing
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is that now in hindsight this was probably preventable if there was actually like a IP owner that like a guardian like if you work with I don't know for example with Warhammer guys right they're a big pain in the ass to
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make sure that everything is according to specs from the IP perspective. And even Tim will from Saber when he had a DICE speech at DICE Edinburgh this year said that the three most important things to work with an IP is approvals,
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approvals approvals. Uh so we didn't require any approvals from any IP holder, right? Because there was none. Right? Now we have like a vast experience of working on IPs that have a IP holder that were very defensive about
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their IP. Anybody who worked on game deck know that there are people very defensive about that IP. And right now we're also working on two under unannounced under IP titles that the IP owners are very defensible about. So
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right now if I would approach uh IP that somebody is not pushing hard on the IP securing side I would make uh on the IP legacy securing side I would make sure like on 100% that we are not stomping on
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some sacred legacy that we do not maybe entirely understand and last but not least like anure studios is is a company that is constantly evolving and I'm like if you look at the outlook of our games there the comp the reception of
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the games is not always great and the quality of the games varies but if you look at the difficulty level at which we operate from year to year we're stepping things up and you can clear it see it
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clearly if you look at our portfolio and we try to convey vay knowledge and learn on our mistakes from project to project and but the problem with that is that gamedev has a very long uh a very long production cycles. So for
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example we created painkiller for five years and if you look at painkiller there are many things like why they why they just didn't how did many problems that were the reason of that this turned out this way or another
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were already implemented were already improved upon during those five years. The problem is that you're seeing five years result of our work, right? But we're a very much different company um that launched this game that started this game. But the also problem is is we
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have multiple production lines. So sometimes we don't manage to catch up with okay, we learned this here, but this game already also made that mistake, right? Because it's for example parallel production or a different genre, etc. So it's sometimes hard for
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us to catch up how to actually transfer the knowledge. And honestly, if you're not a company of a single project, I don't think you realize how hard it really is because the absolute best way and the most efficient way to transfer
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knowhow is to transfer a person. Right? If I did something, I did it on for five years. Now I'm doing this new thing for the next five years. All that knowhow comes with me. Right?
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But when you have free production lines, this suddenly becomes impossible, right? This village knowledge type of knowledge transfer is impossible or it's at least suboptimal because only some people get go there and maybe there is some expertise there, maybe some expertise
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there, but the entire expertise of the company is not present in all the projects of the company, right? Which is super frustrating.
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So an obvious thing is like let's document everything and then we will have knowledge transfer. The problem is like you know how goes with creating and reading documentation right. Uh especially now with chat GPD when everybody creates it with chat GPT and
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then summarize it with chat GPT. Uh so it's the least efficient way of knowledge transfer. So what we've learned the hard way and it goes slowly but it works is to create some kind of workshop some kind of artifacts some
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kind of lectures some kind of uh department standards but that are implemented in other ways than just a just dry documentation.
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Um we have for example a conference called called unure day when it's like a quarterly event almost quarterly event that we do uh where we have a knowledge share um element to it similar to like a mini JC right and we are also sharing
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knowledge on the conferences right this is just this year lineup thank you to my team it's like I'm proud of you and But creating that also takes time and this also can be shared inside the company right we have zero problem
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sharing it with the industry but what I'm most interested about is to share it between our projects right so um so thinking about ways how to not to share the knowledge as uh uh as just by transferring people so we I think we had
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a better name for it but I forgot and I call it anti- village knowledge approach Right? It's like let's it be not just the village knowledge approach of uh transferring knowhow. So I see unshare studios as a learning organization. Uh I
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know that there are some people at my company that are frustrated with the fact that we're not fast enough with this knowledge spread. But I think that given our business model multiple of projects we are really trying and doing
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um usually a good job. So to finish up uh if I could summarize right I am a strong believer that you need to push yourself right you should always punch above your weight. You should always try to for your next thing
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to be more ambitious more difficult. You should always do it this way. The problem is that you should just one division higher, okay? Not more because the more can break you. And we were really swinging for defenses here. We
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were really fighting a tough opponent for when we were starting as Unure Studios. And I think that there are alternative especially in the crisis mode, right?
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that there are alternative universes in which Unshar got bankrupt or Anad released the game in 2024 and then we had mass layoffs or many other scenarios. We were very lucky that it didn't break us and um inside this uh
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industry right now. I'm really happy that we have other projects that we can move on to and take all that knowhow from Painkiller and apply it and hopefully make even better games in the future.
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Um, sorry. Thank you to the team. Thank you to uh Damian Vispenski, the creative director of Painkiller, Barbarawani, the executive producer, Camil Voicage, the art director, and also thank you to Saber because inside this industry turmoil, it was super easy
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to cancel that project. They didn't. They help us through it. Uh they gave us this opportunity. So, also thank you to them. And that's it. Thank you.
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[applause] Um, are there any questions? I think we have couple minutes. Uh, I don't know if we have microphone somewhere.
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Do we? No. Yes. But if you're going to be loud, I can hear you.
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Somebody stole your valor. Uh, thanks. Uh, yeah, I was wondering, do you think you can still spin around the negative reviews? Because like uh when you think about Cyberpunk or or Death Stranding that was review bombed at the time and then uh it released on
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PC and was actually successful and people loved it all of a sudden. So do you still think you can spin it around?
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Um so uh to be to be totally honest, this is obviously the decisions about it is uh is up to the publisher, right? But from my perspective, the negative reviews are not the problem because most of the negative reviews are the OG
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Painkiller fans. We're not going to change the game entirely so that suddenly is OG Painkiller remake or something like that. But because of that, I think that if there would be more sales, if there would be more broad
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appeal, this vocal minority would like be lost in the crowd. So I truly do believe that there is a path to a blues team. The problem is from my perspective is not the reviews, but the amount of sales and that's a more of a I would say
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a publisher questions. Can we turn it around? I know that there are things planned uh to try and do that. But again, as Unshare Studios, we're very open with sharing information, but it's not my place to give out the publishers
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plans for uh for this title. Somebody there you turn it on. If you had a chance to start or over this project, what would be a big biggest changes that you would like?
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That's a So, there are [clears throat] some easy things to swing at, right? The the first easy thing is to really think about is this co-op uh co-op shooter is the best fit with the AP itself, right? to uh to challenge
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that harder. Um the thing is that we don't know in alternative universe how it would pan out because honestly right now I don't have an answer to doublea doom in co-op verminite style is there is the ven diagram of that is how
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big of it the target audience is right so maybe we would have better review at steam but maybe it would solve the same amount I don't know that right so I I honestly think and I don't have a
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solution for that but the biggest problem the biggest challenge we have right now is how to do market research when we work in a model when the publisher wants something very specific, right? Hey, we have this IP, we know the
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genre, we want to have this, right? So, but the thing is that you want to work on a thing that you're sure that this makes sense from a target audience perspective, right? And um there is still a lot of this approach out there
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that hey, if you make a great game, the the audience going to find it right now.
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I think it's a it's a false approach, but I in our business model and even not in our business model, market research like deciding what type of game you're doing and and and and like believing, yeah, this is 100% that this makes sense
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is super hard, right? So, you can go the play testing way, you can go the atur hideo kojima, I know better than the entire world type of a way, right?
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So there are there are multiple ways to approach it but I I I truly do not believe that there is like a silver bullet for that but I think that's the that's the biggest challenge right uh and another thing it's like well the
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multiple things that I just mentioned those were the big ones that we already changed right so uh so we're doing it theoretically hey okay thank you for the lecture uh question because You've been talking about how those five years of painkiller
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influence actually changed the way you run the company and I wonder do after those five years do you think you're more equipped now to have another um to to run another project with a publisher and this separate IP or did it
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equip you well for your own projects and that you want to run from from the start to finish as I'm sure.
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Yeah. So, I think that it definitely equipped us much better to develop games in general, but I don't necessarily think that it equipped us any better to how to approach what I just said to answering the the the previous question,
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how to approach uh choosing your next project, right? Like uh to be honest, I'm kind of happy I don't have $20 million just lying around because I knew that I would invested in an RPG and it's like is it a good I don't know,
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right? So it didn't equip us for that. Definitely taught us a lot about um working with a publisher. How do you work? There are a lot of there are a lot of things that we either are doing differently right now with the
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publishers that we work for right now with or we want to change in the future.
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We just didn't get around to it. So, so yeah, it definitely makes us a better video game developer. It doesn't necessarily means that we are better equipped to know what the best game to make. That makes sense.
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body else. Uh we don't have time for any more questions. So if I'll be on outside if somebody wants to ask you. Thank you very much.
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[applause]
Topics:PainkillerUnshare StudiosŁukasz Hacuragame developmentdouble-A gamesco-op shootergame industry conferencestudio growthgame productionpublisher collaboration
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