Every so often a guest reminds me that "making games" and "the games industry" aren't the same job. Jay Powell has spent thirty years in the second one without ever really doing the first — and by the end of this conversation I was convinced that's exactly why he's lasted.

Jay started as an English lit major in the early nineties, at a point when "getting into games" wasn't even a real career path yet. He fell into the industry sideways — a beer-money job testing games in college — and built his whole career on a skill nobody trains for: translation. Inventing distribution contracts one country at a time before digital distribution existed. Explaining to movie studios, museums, and non-profits how the game industry actually works. Sitting with publishers who can't articulate what they want and figuring out what they mean instead of what they say.

He's also remarkably candid about the cost of all that — a stretch of years carrying acquisitions, distribution, and production almost single-handedly that ended in an ulcer and a 4am wake-up call he doesn't sugarcoat. It's one of the more honest conversations about burnout we've had on this show, and it comes from someone who still, thirty years later, can't imagine doing anything else.

These days Jay runs The Powell Group and the new publishing venture Blue Ridge Games, and spends a lot of his time with young studios in Brazil, Ecuador, and Colombia, trying to save them a few of the lessons he learned the hard way.

"I would never claim to be a world-class game designer."
— on thirty years in the industry built entirely on the business side, not the craft.

"You will f***ing hate it here."
— the Amazon interviewer who talked him out of a West Coast tech job. She was right.

"That's a good indicator right there."
— on throwing up blood at 4am as the line that finally told him to quit.

"Mobile games are less about making something fun and more about making a colorful little spreadsheet that makes a lot of money."
— on why his team walked away from mobile entirely.

Alex (00:00)
Hey Jay. Thank you for jumping on this call. We've never met before, so I appreciate you reaching out and wanting to jump on the pod and have a conversation. I'm excited to dig into your history and what you've done. I always like to kick this conversation off with my favourite first question: what first inspired you about video games?

Jay Powell (00:20)
Lord. So I'm pushing 50, and I've been playing games since I was about seven or eight. It wasn't any one thing, really — though if I had to pin it down, it'd be this: my sixth-grade reading teacher was a huge fan of The Hobbit. I read The Hobbit for the first time at that age, and I think that's what pushed me — it takes you to a different world, it's a fantastic story, there's action, there's all this other stuff, and all of that translates to games.

So I've been a fan and a player of games since I was very young. I did not have a console until I actually started working in the industry, because my mother was a teacher and she said, "You have a computer. You don't need a Nintendo."

Alex (01:32)
So the exploration of worlds was the inspiration. You started with computers — any particular genres that took you? Did you play socially?

Jay Powell (01:49)
Back then there was no playing socially — I predate Steam and iOS and all of that. Of course there are genres now that I prefer, but back then it was: my god, what can I get my hands on, what can I play? I started with the Commodore 64 — Silent Service and Jupiter Lander are the ones that come to mind immediately. I snuck off from a school trip one time because there was a Babbage's or a GameStop in the strip mall where we stopped for school dinner, and I bought my first Mortal Kombat game so my parents wouldn't know I had this hyper-violent thing at the time.

Alex (02:58)
Huh. And where did you grow up?

Jay Powell (03:01)
In the middle of North Carolina — for those who aren't in the US, if you look at the east coast and there's a big hump in the middle of it, that's the eastern edge of North Carolina.

Alex (03:14)
Got it. And was anybody else in your family into video games? Any siblings, cousins?

Jay Powell (03:20)
Not nearly as much as I was. My dad had a copy of Flight Simulator, which I was not allowed to touch under any circumstances. My mom, no. My brother a little bit — he's got three kids now too, so he's a casual player — but I was the one that went off the deep end. This is what I loved and what I did.

Alex (03:47)
Okay, so it really got under your skin. Was it your main hobby? Any others that competed with it?

Jay Powell (03:54)
That was it. Not my only hobby, but by far the biggest one. I played somewhat competitive golf when I was younger — God knows I can't do that now. Reading would be the close second. That's basically what it was.

Alex (04:25)
So books and video games pretty much defined you, with a little bit of golf.

Jay Powell (04:27)
I was your classic nerd, Alex — no other way to put it. Straight A's in school, loved reading, loved playing video games. I don't fit much better into that archetype than that.

Alex (04:39)
Was there a point in those early days where you thought you wanted to get into making video games, or were you happy being a consumer?

Jay Powell (04:52)
I was actually a very avid programmer back in the day — but that was in the days of BASIC. You'd get these magazines, and the last page was code, and you typed it in flawlessly — if you messed it up, you had to start over, there was no edit button. When you were done, you had a game you could play until you rebooted your computer and the RAM was gone. I seriously looked down that route, and then when I got to college and realized programming requires a whole lot of math, that's when I was done.

I don't ever think there was a time when I was like, "my God, I need to get into the video game industry" — even in college it wasn't like that. I got my first job almost by accident. I was always planning to work in tech in some way, but there wasn't some deep embedded dream of working in the game industry. That was the early nineties, though — there wasn't really what we have now.

Alex (06:13)
It certainly didn't feel like a reachable goal, making video games — always felt like they were made by someone else. So you went to the University of North Carolina and studied English language and literature — nothing techy.

Jay Powell (06:35)
Went back to my reading side, basically. Took one programming class, and even then that was in Pascal, which at that point was already a pretty much dead language — but that's what they were teaching. That's where I figured out the whole "there's a lot of math in this and that's not me." But yes, English literature major — over the years of doing our podcast, I've learned how many more of us there are. I'm not alone — I too read in college. That was all we did.

Alex (07:12)
So you graduate, and then when do you find your way into the first business development role — helping devs and publishers produce and develop? How did that happen?

Jay Powell (07:33)
Keep in mind, I had one business class in college — intro to economics, I'm pretty sure I got a D in it, just barely passed. In the summer I was a resident assistant — basically the student in charge of the other students on the hall. Fantastic for your parents because you got free room and food, but you didn't get a paycheck, so if you wanted to do something fun, you still needed your own money.

I was working the desk one night and opened the student newspaper, and there was an ad that said: come play video games and tell us what you think. Today we'd call that a junior scout — back then there wasn't even a word for it, I was an "evaluator." I took that job literally for beer money, so I could go out on weekends. I was an evaluator for several months, and then the intern in charge of that program graduated, and the two owners promoted me to be in charge of all the evaluators. That's where I got the first taste of — my God, this is a job, there are people that do this.

When I graduated college, they offered me a job. Still knew nothing about business, not a thing, but I learned it all by doing it, for the next eight, ten years. It really was: here's a general classified ad in the student newspaper, and thirty years later, here I am talking with you.

Alex (09:34)
That was the genesis that crafted a career. How did you go from evaluator to actually helping big studios with their business?

Jay Powell (09:49)
The main part was just showing that I knew what I was doing during the internship. We'd play a game for 45 minutes to an hour and then fill out a form, and the whole time I'm filling that out and looking at the owners going, "well, you should ask this, and you should probably ask this." So it was showing value as an intern, as a lowly minimum-wage person at the time.

When I started full time after college, this was a very small company — the two owners, and then I was number three. We were all in one room in what they called an office park, but it was actually three mobile homes connected by hallways. It was very much learn-by-doing. Back then there was no digital distribution — if we had a game we wanted worldwide publishing on, we had to do twenty to twenty-five different contracts, because every country had its own contact. Nobody was doing global publishing — that didn't exist.

That's where I learned a lot of the business and sales stuff, and where I learned contracts. I don't have a law degree — we have a corporate attorney just like everybody else — but I can make their lives a little easier because I can say, okay, this is normal, this is not normal. It was very much learning on the fly. Because it was a small company, I literally saw every part of the business — someone would call and say, "I need to speak to invoicing," and I'd say, "okay, hold on, Lloyd, we've got to talk to invoicing." It was a really good learning experience, and it also instilled a ridiculous work ethic in me.

Alex (12:05)
Octagon — not a publisher I've heard of, but it sounds like even from that time you had big contracts with big studios.

Jay Powell (12:11)
It doesn't exist anymore. No, no — Octagon wasn't a publisher, we turned it into one about eight years in, but we were an agency. I did the very first North American distribution deals for a little company called Paradox. Did the first publishing deal for Haemimont Studios, which is going on still to this day. The first deal for Starbreeze — and that was one of my best sales moments: we sold a development-publishing agreement to, I believe, Crave, for a game with no playable demo. It was simply a mirrored cube floating down a hallway. Not that impressive these days with Unity and Unreal, but for a homemade engine, that sold the entire project.

We worked with People Can Fly very early on. Did a publishing deal for DICE, which was the last game they did before Battlefield 1942. So it was a lot of meeting people from around the world, learning how to market these games, "this game is like this plus this." I did it for seven or eight years, and then we transitioned — same people, but we stopped doing agency work at Octagon and created a casual game publisher called MERSCOM. That's what I did for the next three years — I built one of the industry's first digital distribution networks, because casual games in the late 2000s weren't free-to-play — it was a nineteen-ninety-nine-dollar game with a one-hour demo, and you were going country by country, signing a distribution deal with every single website.

When I ended up quitting that job after about ten years, shortly after, they got bought by Playdom, who'd been bought by Disney. But it was time for me to leave that company.

Alex (14:55)
Right, so that's fascinating — that early era, a lot of Scandinavian studios, it sounds like.

Jay Powell (15:01)
It really was, yeah.

Alex (15:02)
They were probably also trying to figure out how you even distribute a game in a country — the whole industry was so primitive back then. Must have been a huge opportunity, both sides figuring it out as you go.

Jay Powell (15:24)
That's what it was. Without naming names — this wasn't done illegally — we legally sold a publisher's game to their own distributor in another country one time, because that publisher didn't understand or know their own distribution network, and neither did the other company, apparently, because they bought it. We basically sold a company their own game.

Alex (16:01)
You're literally trying to figure out how to get boxed copies into all the big retailers — that takes connections, it's not like somebody from Scandinavia can rock up to Walmart and say "I've got some games." Your development and the industry's development were running in parallel.

Jay Powell (16:36)
Yeah, there was no methodology, no training course, nothing like that. It's like: here's the problem, solve it, figure it out. That's what we did.

Alex (16:46)
It's a bit like the early days of 2D to 3D — designers just figured it out and built the playbook as they went. Sounds like you had a similar thing but for distribution. Then you switched to digital — same philosophy, different medium?

Jay Powell (17:29)
Honestly, yeah — it was very similar. You have one game, you need twenty contracts for it. In many ways it was actually easier, because most of the major websites selling games — real.com, Big Fish Games, iWin — were usually based either in the US or Western Europe, so it was easier to get on the phone with them, because by that point email was pretty standard. When I first started, it wasn't — it was "you need to do a deal in Brazil, pick up the phone and dial Brazil and get that thing done." Even to this day, with the new publishing company, we're looking for partners to distribute the games in Asia and South America, and the woman on my team I've been working with off and on for twenty-five years — we're literally doing the same thing we did twenty years ago. Fundamentally it doesn't change. Technology makes it easier, but you still need to identify the possible partners and reach out to them with a kit and say, "here's the game, here's why you should buy it or sell it, let's do a deal." The fundamentals have never changed — it's the technology and the way we get things done these days that helps a lot of it.

Alex (19:04)
The digital side, not having to deal with the logistics of physically shipping product, must have made things simpler. So MERSCOM and Octagon rolled together but shifted focus — covering a lot of platforms, mobile but also the bigger digital platforms like XBLA.

Jay Powell (19:33)
Back then we literally handled everything. Today I've moved out of the mobile space, and part of that's because I'm such a gamer — I'm not a big free-to-play gamer. I was like, I'm old, let me pay for my game and just play it, leave me alone.

But the reason I left was very much a hard lesson in mental health, which we didn't have — nobody talked about it back then. What happened was the two owners I started out with, ten years later, wanted to grow the publishing side and went and got investment funding. If you've ever done that, it's a full-time job. So all of their work fell to me. There was about a year and a half or two years where I was responsible for acquisitions for the publishing company, all the distribution, and at the same time producing one or two games myself and managing, as an executive producer, two other producers who were each doing two to three games apiece.

It got to the point where I was stressed out, getting sick, had an ulcer, was throwing up blood at four in the morning — all that kind of wonderful stuff. And at the time, again, no mental health anything — it was "suck it up and do what you need to do." We didn't have the technology to really log in remotely effectively — we could, but my God it was slow, you could do ten things normally in the time it took to do one on that VPN. So I'd wake up at two or three in the morning, not able to go back to sleep, and drive into the office — by the time everyone else got in, I'd already been working six or eight hours.

Then it came a time when they'd gone through what they'd raised, and one of the owners came into my office and said, "Hey, we're going to have to do some layoffs today, but you're fine — just stay in your office and keep the door shut." Everything clicked at that point. I went: you know what, give my job to somebody else. I quit and left.

My wife — we've been married twenty-three years, together twenty-five — she came home, usually way later than me. At the time I was making way more money than someone in their twenties needs to be making. She opened the door and I'm sitting on the couch playing NCAA football, whatever year it was. She's like, "why are you home?" I'm like, "I quit my job." She's like, "is there a plan?" I'm like, "there's most of a plan." She's like, "alright, let's do this." And we carried on. But that was a very hard lesson in taking care of yourself and what's actually important versus what's less important.

Alex (22:53)
A horrible thing to go through, but a perfect indication of how hard it is to take that step back and ask, is this too much, can I handle this — for your wife and family too, navigating you being so committed. One of the few drawbacks of making games is that you can lose yourself in it — more pressure, more pressure, until you have to pay the price.

Jay Powell (23:40)
It's one of those things I try to teach developers to this day, especially when the crunch conversation comes up. Yes, crunch is horrible — but with a big asterisk so I don't get destroyed online, we are our own worst enemy sometimes. I had that mentality of "this is what I love, if I quit, somebody else just takes my place, so I have to keep doing this." That's where I see a lot of folks in this industry — their mental health being destroyed without realizing it. It's worse now, too, because back then if you quit a horrible job you'd find another one — now it's hard to. So you're stuck killing yourself to get things done, which isn't healthy, but hey, we work in games and it's awesome. It's a horrible circle, and I was very much part of it, which is why I get it. You go on Reddit and someone's talking about their job, and somebody says "just get a new job, just quit" — you can't, that's not an option today; you have to keep the job you've got, but do you push back, and if you do, are they going to replace you, because a thousand other people want it. It's very indicative of this industry, part of it — because we love what we do. Would you be doing this as long as we have if you didn't? It doesn't have an easy answer.

Alex (26:10)
It's very much a passion-driven industry. I'm similar — I love what I do, but it's just video games, I'm not saving people's lives. There's a point where you just have to say, that's enough, there's more important stuff.

Jay Powell (26:33)
I'd say that line is definitely when you're waking up at three in the morning throwing up blood — that's a good indicator right there.

Alex (26:38)
That's a great line to draw. So you quit — that role that's basically defined you for a long, long time, taught you everything you've known. What do you do, where do you go?

Jay Powell (27:00)
When I told my wife there was part of a plan, it wasn't necessarily a lie. Two friends from that company had been laid off or quit, and they'd started a little thing on their own. One guy was an excellent producer, somewhat retired almost, because he'd sold his development studio to Ubi. The other guy was super young, a fantastic designer. They'd created what we'd now call a production house, but that didn't exist as a term then — they needed a biz-dev guy, and there we go.

So we started a company called DigiRonin Games, because we were "digital Ronin." I did not come up with that name — if you look at all the companies I'm in charge of, they have really basic names, because I'm horrible at that. What we were doing was: developers thought we were a publisher, publishers thought we were developers, the reality was we were somewhere in between. We'd work with National Geographic, Disney, Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon — they'd say, we need this type of game, and we'd design and produce it in-house, and find an experienced studio somewhere else — US, Europe, South America, wherever — to do the coding and art, and put it all together as one package and deliver it. We did that for three years. Nothing groundbreaking — a lot of simple, even Flash games — but if it was a GBA or DS licensed game, sometimes we were the ones doing that.

Then we tried the jump so many other developers do, from contract work to making your own stuff. We had some money saved up, decided to do this, and went after casual — hidden object was still in a big boom. I told the guys: look, we're going to be just another company doing hidden object games unless we stand out somehow. Back then Big Fish Games was the big fish in that industry, launching a new game every single day, Saturday and Sunday included. So I did some research — who plays these games? Women 35 and older, that was the known demographic. I came up with a list of ten book authors who fit that demographic and started cold-calling agents. Most had no idea what we were talking about, and then I hit one, and the assistant was like, "oh my God, this is awesome, I love these games." We're in — so we licensed a New York Times bestselling author and made a game off her novel. It did pretty well — this is how you do licensing, she's promoting it to her audience, and her audience is the same audience that plays these games. Didn't get rich off it, but it was profitable, did pretty well.

Then my two business partners decided we should do fully original content. I said, guys, this isn't going to work — two versus one, so it happened. We released two other games, neither did much of anything, and at that point I said, I can't keep doing this — I had a family at that point, our son, and I need a real paycheck coming in. So I left that company and created the Powell Group at that point — that was back in 2010.

Alex (31:28)
So the challenges of being a human making games — kids, more responsibility — pushed you to break away from that process. Talk to me about the licensing stuff — I'm always fascinated by finding the right balance between satisfying the license holder and building something efficient and profitable yourself. Any horror stories, any successes where it came together?

Jay Powell (32:17)
I wouldn't say there were horror stories, but you had to keep in mind, back then games weren't the defined medium they are now. I'd been working with licenses my whole career — I'm fortunate enough, and this is going to age me, when I went to E3 the first time, it was in Atlanta, they weren't even in LA yet. We were working with Simon and Schuster Interactive, and they had a North American sales pipeline, but we did all their international publishing deals — they were working on a game called Starship Titanic, which is Douglas Adams, and I was fortunate enough to have dinner with Douglas Adams. You're twenty-two years old, geeking out, having dinner with Douglas Adams.

It was less about the contract stuff, and a lot about translation, because licensees didn't know how to work with licensed source material. So it was a lot of translating — this is how the game industry works versus how the movie industry or book industry works — and you learned where the tough points were going to be. We had a client one time — run by a friend of mine, this wasn't some random thing — and we're working on a game for them, and they kept coming back: I just need this change, I just need this thing — nothing ever big enough to need its own change order, which is where you learn to do change orders, and why I impress that onto developers to this day. Finally I got tired of it, and I didn't have any contractual way to push back, but I told him: okay, this is the last little thing we're doing — next time you call me, even if it's to add a registered symbol to your company name, I'm going to charge you five thousand dollars. Never got another request.

We had a woman working with a non-profit for a very big athlete, and when we sent her concept art for the game, she lost her mind over the color of the buildings, because those weren't the right colors. We're like, that's such a tiny thing to fix, and we're not even making the game yet, we're in pre-production. So a lot of it really came down to translation — this is how things work in your industry, this is how things work in ours, and managing expectations between the two. Explaining to somebody: we've got a gold master candidate, you can't come back and say we need another level — no, your opportunity for comments was six months ago, it's not going to happen. So there weren't that many absolute explosions.

I did piss off the Smithsonian Institution by accident one time — I referred to what we were doing with them as having "partnered up" with the Smithsonian. Partner, I didn't know this at the time, is a really big word, and they were livid because it insinuated we had some sort of formal, deeply embedded partnership with the Smithsonian. They wanted a full retraction and were going to personally email everybody on our email list to tell them that wasn't true. I was on my way to a buddy's bachelor party, a six or seven hour drive, and I talked them off that ledge. I said, look, this didn't go to CNN, I think you're overly worried about something you don't need to be, this went to a bunch of game developers, this is not that. I did finally talk them off the ledge, but you get that phone call while you're driving down the interstate, and it's like, great, I pissed off one of the greatest museum organizations in the world.

Alex (37:05)
That angle of translating one industry to another, the fundamentals of what it means to make games, to people who don't speak that same language — I could see how that's a huge challenge, and every client was probably different, some super into it, some "why are we even bothering."

Jay Powell (37:28)
Some of them were absolutely fantastic. When you did a deal with Nickelodeon, in my opinion, they were the best — you got an entire character bible, everything down to the RGB codes for Dora's shirt. My favorite part was when we got the list of things we could and could not have Dora do in a game, which really just makes you want to have Dora do those things, because you're so used to her. At that time Nickelodeon was the absolute standout best, because they came into it understanding what you needed and delivered it in one gigantic file, which made things a whole lot easier. No one else at the time was nearly that organized.

Alex (38:24)
Yeah, I guess Nickelodeon saw the benefit of having video games and the connection to similar markets — they were ahead of the curve. So you did your own thing, and then went off to form your own endeavor. What inspired you? You mentioned it felt like time to leave that group — what were you trying to do?

Jay Powell (38:53)
I was trying to get a job. Because if you look at my career, you're like: wait, you left one company where you weren't making any money and started your own company from scratch — that doesn't really make sense. The reality was, I was interviewing for all these jobs — Microsoft, Amazon, places like Mattel down in LA. I flew out to Amazon twice — the other coast for me — and did their thing where you sit in the interview room all day and they pipeline people in to talk to you. Did that twice and didn't get a job.

I know why now. There was a woman in one of those sessions who comes in with her laptop, sits it down, and says, "I'm not ignoring you, I'm an engineer, this is just how I take notes." I said, look, I've worked with engineers my entire career, I get you, don't worry about it. We went through the whole process, and at the end she looked at me and said, "I'm going to be straight with you — you have everything you need to be able to do this job and do it well, but you will fucking hate it here." I said, you don't know me, how dare you — but she was right. We ended up working with Amazon shortly after that on flashcard games for the E Ink Kindles, right around when the Fire was about to launch. But she was right — there's no way I could work in that environment, too much red tape. I'm used to: hey, let's do this, do it.

So what finally clicked was: okay, if I get one of these jobs and relocate my family all the way to the West Coast, where cost of living is four times as high as where I live, and then somebody has a bad day on Wall Street — which we see all the time now — and they lay off a thousand people, I'm stuck in Seattle or LA or San Francisco, not happy there, and I've dragged my whole family. So I thought, let's figure something out. At the time I was doing business consulting for a consulting firm whose whole niche was free-to-play monetization optimization for mobile games, and I thought: if there's a business to cater to a niche that specific, there's got to be one for doing biz-dev consulting for what I do. That's where the Powell Group got started. It wasn't an immediate jump from one no-paying job to the next — there was a thing in between, but it was a learning experience.

Alex (42:13)
That point about moving family — it's not just you, there's connections, kids in school, all those challenges. This industry is so global, so much opportunity to explore the world, but you've always got to balance whether your family's going to be okay. Was that challenging for you?

Jay Powell (42:56)
Yeah, it wasn't something I wanted to do.

Alex (42:57)
No, don't blame you. So the Powell Group — you've been doing that for a while, and it sounds like you're doing a very similar thing, helping teams and developers figure out how to market and build their games.

Jay Powell (43:13)
Yeah, but we've done it on a much larger scale, which is why we've grown as much as we have. It's not just developers — we've worked with publishers, done scouting for publishers before the world of having an internal scouting team really took off, worked with government agencies prepping them for conferences, mentoring groups within those provinces or countries, worked with developers, worked with universities. One of the criticisms I got from a good friend of mine — which is why we've toned down our website a lot — he said, "man, nobody knows what you do, you do so many different things that it's not clear." I said, okay, that's good feedback — but that's really the situation. You have to be nimble to survive as a consulting firm in this industry, especially for sixteen years. If you look at what we did when we first got started, it's pretty wildly different from what we do now.

I'm good friends with the folks at MeetToMatch — Fedor van Herpen and Osgard literally destroyed one of my revenue streams. One of the things we used to do was work with a government agency, meet with all the developers, understand what they have, what they're doing, what they're looking for, and then go and hand-manage their entire schedule for GDC or the previous iterations of Gamescom. Then MeetToMatch comes along and completely screws all that, because now it's a web platform where you can do that. It's very much a case of understanding the bigger side of the industry, where you might be able to fit in, where there's a need, and working from there, month after month, year after year, being ready to switch gears.

Alex (45:25)
Yeah, it's a fascinating opportunity to get such a diverse experience working with different companies, projects, endeavors. The scouting side is always interesting to me — how do you go about navigating that, trying to match games with publishers?

Jay Powell (45:47)
First off, you have to have an absolute world-class scouting team, which I'm fortunate to have — I've labeled it witchcraft because there's no other explanation for how they do what they do. For a couple of years it was a big part of what we did, from small indie publishers up to global ones. You have to deep-dive on what the company actually wants — a scout for one of the bigger studios says "we want something easy to play but hard to master, and engaging," and you get ten minutes of nothing. So you ask why, a lot.

Companies would say, "we just want to try it for a month," and I'd say no, because it takes a month just to figure out what you actually want — I know because I've done this half a dozen times already. It's a case of getting into it, and having a team that can say, "here's something you didn't say you were looking for, but you'll probably like." Clients would ask, "how do we know you're not showing better games to somebody else?" — valid in theory, but in practice it never happened, even running scouting for five or six publishers, because no two were ever looking for exactly the same thing. Ninety percent of it is having a world-class scouting team. It gets back to that translation thing — understanding what they're saying, and translating it into what they actually mean.

Alex (48:25)
Yeah, that does sound like a similar level of translation. How broad are the publishers you've worked with — I presume not just game developers?

Jay Powell (48:35)
No, they were all publishers — everything from indie publishers who've been around ten years — I had one call me and say, "I've just come to the realization that you know a lot more developers than we do," and I said, I'm not being arrogant, but yeah, we do — all the way up to multinational, publicly traded companies doing multi-platform stuff. We kept ridiculous notes — one company didn't want to see pixel art games, another didn't want games with color palettes that were too cheerful. We'd get into a very tight section of what they wanted, and inevitably we'd sit down to greenlight meetings, and my team would go through: here's five games that fit what you want, and here's one that you'd say you didn't want, but you should look at. Nine times out of ten, it was that last one that really got everybody's attention. So there's a lot of differentiation in things, and that's probably where we started our biggest move away from mobile — because, and somebody's going to hate me for saying this, mobile games are less about making something fun and more about making a colorful little spreadsheet that makes a lot of money. That's not what we do, that's not the fun part of this industry that we love. We love finding these little niche indie games out of the middle of nowhere and going, my god, with a little bit of hand-holding, that can be fantastic. So that's what we did.

Alex (50:29)
I imagine you feel a lot of responsibility too, finding four or five games and trying to represent them all evenly — a lot to manage and balance, from both the developer and publisher side.

Jay Powell (50:49)
You have to be very clinical, because if you let your brain — or your heart — get too far into it, it gets complicated. You have to break each one down and say, this one's appealing for this reason, this one's appealing for that reason. The reality is, we weren't showing anybody anything that wasn't capable of being published. That's where the early stages, in the back of my mind, of this publishing company we started a few months ago started forming — because I'm very much of the opinion that there are more good games out there that could be published than there are publishers to actually publish them. So that developer has to rely on themselves to self-publish, they don't really know how to do that, and the game ends up not being a success. So when you're looking at ten or fifteen different games, you really have to break it down to the fundamentals to understand which ones to pitch to which publishers, and you have to give everybody the same shot — it's not a situation where we're going to show this one to this client but not to anybody else. That's a level of specificity we weren't being paid enough to handle.

Alex (52:16)
So now, the games that don't get picked by a publisher, or that you see as a great opportunity — with Blue Ridge Games you can publish yourself. You've got both bases covered: scouting and pitching for larger publishers, and finding gems in the rough to drive forward yourself.

Jay Powell (52:39)
That's where that nimble part comes in, because there's not really a role anymore for us to do that sort of stuff — over the last four or five years, publishers have brought together their own scouting teams, and the possibility of showing any publisher something they haven't already seen is so small that we actually stopped doing that probably three years ago, because there wasn't a need for it. COVID had a huge part in that too — when COVID hit, you couldn't send scouts to twelve or fourteen conferences a year to look at pitch competitions, everything had to be online, so all the publishers created submission pages, "submit your game here." At that point, what value does an external scout or agent have, when every developer has the technology to go straight to a publisher? So COVID killed a lot of that.

I know a lot of these scouts, I go to conferences with them, they're fantastic people, brilliant at what they do, and I'm not going to sit there with a straight face and say I can do this better than them — realistically you can't. Everyone has it, whether or not they know how to optimize it is a whole different thing — that leads to the indie game business thoughts and the online classes we do. But the opportunity exists for you to do that — all you need to do is the work.

Alex (54:32)
Yeah, that makes sense. I'm curious — in these years looking at a lot of games, helping build a lot of games, has it changed the way you play games?

Jay Powell (54:49)
No — it's changed in that I don't play that many mobile free-to-play games anymore, but God no. I have this eight-foot window in my office that looks out to a house across the street, and the husband at one point said, "man, I see you at night, you're working all hours," and I said, dude, I'm not working, I'm playing games. I still do that, I still love doing it, just don't have as much time anymore. My son's fourteen now — we've all been playing games. If the family's getting along too well, we bring out things like Mario Party and Mario Kart so we can vent frustration on one another in a healthy environment. But it hasn't really changed — I play the same types of games I've been playing for twenty or thirty years, I still love them, sometimes I overly criticize some of them, but it hasn't changed how much I still enjoy it.

Alex (55:56)
Right, and your son plays now, so it's a family endeavor.

Jay Powell (56:04)
Yeah — I think the first time I ever dropped an F-bomb on my son, he was about eight or so, we were playing one of the Overcooked games, and I looked at my elementary-school-age son and went, "what the f are you doing, we don't play Overcooked games in this family anymore."

Alex (56:26)
I mean, it's a tense game, man, you've got to be together, correlated — do the plates, I'll do the onions, come on.

Jay Powell (56:31)
Stay on your side of the kitchen, why are you doing this — this is not hard, I know you're eight, but deal with it, okay.

Alex (56:43)
Yes, that game is not for the faint-hearted. Okay, and you've worked with a lot of developers too, Jay — you mentioned the early days of BASIC programming, actually being part of the construction of games — does that ever appeal to you, or have you found the role you've taken on gives you enough input into how games are made that you feel connected?

Jay Powell (57:09)
I know I'm old enough now that I can't explain a lot of what's in games anymore — I look at code people write and they're like, "we're doing this," and my god, that means nothing to me, I'm that far out of it. The places I'm able to add input very much fall under the business, the publishing things — okay, you have this type of game, but it's going to be compared to this, and this is where you need to find a differentiator, or a different genre, or tweak your Steam tags, or something along that.

I did design for a little while back when we were doing the casual hidden-object games, because quite frankly, it wasn't that hard back then — you didn't need a graduate degree in game design to lay out the order for a hidden-object game. Of course I did programming when I was much younger, and I did producing — that's the reason I have a world-class production team now, because I never want to do that again. I know I have ADHD — don't put me in charge of organizing, it's going to be all over the board.

We do a lot of this with young studios we meet through government programs — I spent a lot of time in Brazil and Ecuador, I just came back about a month ago from Colombia, and you sit down with these teams and say, okay, I see where you're going with this game, but here's something to keep in mind. A lot of it comes down to explaining why a certain genre isn't their best option, because there's like four genres publishers just avoid — not counting sports and racing, but platformers, Metroidvanias, puzzle games, visual novels — not because they suck, but because there are so many of them. Coming straight in as a young developer, those are the starter genres, easiest to get a hold of, easiest to do, which is why there are so many of them. You have to explain the Hollow Knight problem to them — a developer makes a Metroidvania, takes it to the publisher, and you're going to sell it for the same price as Hollow Knight or Silksong. So the publisher's like, okay, they can buy your game, which is unknown and doesn't stand out, or they can just buy Hollow Knight — why are they buying your game? A lot of developers can't answer that. That's where a lot of our feedback comes in now — I see where you're going with this game, here's some advice on the design side to make it stand out more, and here's some advice on the business side on which publishers you need to be talking to. That's as far as I like to go anymore, because the industry has evolved ridiculously in thirty years. I know I'm not a world-class game designer, I'd never claim to be that, but sitting down and helping these teams get to the best part of: is my game sellable, is it marketable.

Alex (1:00:38)
That sounds like a lot of your focus now — helping young teams find their way, with over a thousand games a week going up on Steam. Must be interesting helping people navigate that.

Jay Powell (1:00:53)
It's a change I've seen in my career the last five or ten years — less about "let's go out and make a ton of money" and more about, look, I'm getting older, I don't want to work sixty hours a week anymore, what do I enjoy doing — I enjoy working with young teams because they keep me interested in the industry, their excitement and passion counters my old man's cynicism of "why am I still doing this." Over the last five or ten years it's transitioned a lot into: how can we help the next generation, how can we keep them from making the mistakes and having to learn the way we had to learn back in the day.

Alex (1:01:40)
Yeah, take advantage of all that discovery of how games get made and published that you've gathered over the years, and help other folks make something great. Last question — if you weren't in video games, what would you be doing, Jay?

Jay Powell (1:01:57)
I have no idea, this is all I know anymore. When I was young I wanted to be a marine biologist, but these days, realistically, if I weren't doing what I'm doing right now, there's actually a role at universities for me at this point — which is part of the reason we started the online business school. That's honestly where I can see myself being in fifteen, twenty years. I'm never going to retire, I know that — I think a lot of us in the industry know that. There will come a day when I'm doing a lot less work than I am right now, but I can't leave this industry, I adore it. So that's probably where I'd end up — thirty years in, I don't know what else I could possibly do. It's part of the reason I'm still here — I can't do anything else, this is my life at this point.

Alex (1:03:01)
You bet the farm on video games, and what a great place to do it. Thank you, Jay — great conversation. Hearing those early stories about getting games across into other countries, and all the work you do now helping people navigate this oversaturated market, was awesome. Thank you for your time.

Jay Powell (1:03:27)
Appreciate it, man. It's awesome.