Xalavier Nelson Jr. on making money and happy players "without exploding in the process"

18.04.2024 - 14:47 / gamesindustry.biz

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Xalavier Nelson Jr., CEO of Strange Scaffold, is working through what sustainability means in the games industry during a time of economic uncertainty.

"I don't think sustainability is a utopian idea," he tells GamesIndustry.biz in a discussion at the DICE Summit. "It's just a necessity. Everything you do cannot guarantee survival, but you should at least create the conditions for it to occur.

"One of the disturbing things about the current state of games is that all of the conditions exist in the ecosystem for great things to be made for players consistently, without destroying people in the process."

Nelson says the opportunities to make things stable and better for workers are being ignored. Meanwhile, in the AAA space, the industry is taking its chances for larger profit margins and the next big hit.

Nelson says, "I think giant games deserve to exist and play a special place in our ecosystem. But every space in games is escalating, and every space in entertainment in general is escalating. (You can certainly see this in Hollywood). It means we are confronting an environment where our games are not simply allowed to be fun, profitable, meaningful experiences for players."

Given the ongoing reactions to the current economic downturn, such as fewer investments, Nelson believes that the industry needs to learn from previous lean periods.

"I think we are ignoring a lot of the lessons of history in the current escalation that is being pursued throughout the games industry," he says.

"Because if we just make reasonable decisions based on the ecosystem before us, the desires of our players, and the potential that we now have thanks to the advancement in accessibility technology, again, we can make a lot of money and make a lot of players happy without exploding in the process."

He explains that on an industry wide level is a cauterization of two distinct categories of business operations.

Nelson explains, "The first one is the AAAA normal. A lot of people were joking very recently about AAAA being used for Skull and Bones by Ubisoft's CEO. I think it's fair to call [out] the complexity of systems, gameplay, and graphics that's happening across the AAA sector when you're spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a project that's not just AAA anymore."

He continues, "On the other end of the spectrum, you have these partisan boutique experiences crafted by focused teams, projects that can reach people in specific ways that a bigger project cannot. Dave The Diver is a perfect example. It had to be produced by an offshoot of Nexon."

Nelson believes studios can change their production processes to create a game like Dave the Diver, which was