Jack Tretton, Former PlayStation CEO, On His Indie Venture And The Future

Only five years ago, Jack Tretton was the public face of PlayStation. An affable everyman, he was known for his breezy E3 presentations and cool dad persona. When he stepped away from the company in 2014, he could have exited the industry entirely. Instead, he’s quietly shifted to a more behind-the-scenes role, partnering with indie developers to offer advice and funding. He worked with Studio Wildcard on Ark: Survival Evolved and has become the funds investor in Blue Isle Studios, the developer behind Slender the Arrival, Valley, and the upcoming Citadel: Forged with Fire.

As Blue Isle just announced a PlayStation 4 and Xbox One release date of October 11 for Citadel, GameSpot spoke with Tretton about his new role, the challenges facing the games industry, and his plans for the future.

What drew you to this venture and especially toward indie games, specifically?

I think there's a tremendous opportunity to really cut the cords from the dependence on large studios to bring a product to market and get it in gamers' hands, and to have to be dependent on major retailers to get product on the shelf. It really opens the door to creative talent all over the world, of any size. The only limit is your ability to create a commercially successful title. I think the bigger challenge is really to get attention out there and to get it into the hands and eyeballs of gamers around the world.

That's where I really come in, to lend that expertise in bringing over 300 titles to market in my corporate days. And to help these smaller studios navigate the waters of fund-raising and marketing, and getting noticed by the various platform holders and really separate their games from the thousands of games that are available digitally around the world.

Do you like having a lower profile? Do you feel less pressure being out of the corporate game?

I really enjoyed my time in the spotlight and it certainly has its advantages and disadvantages. I think the thing that I was really drawn to is that I really wanted to partner with the projects and people that I was personally excited to be partnered with. When you're an independent developer, you have the limit of your imagination and your work ethic and the funding, but you can really go in any direction that you want to go in.

I feel the same way about my career. I enjoyed my time being a part of a large team, but you basically had to all subscribe to the same strategy and love all the same things. When you work independently, you're able to pick your partners, and that’s something that greatly appeals to me. At this stage in my career I really wanted to pick partners and projects that I was personally passionate about. And it's worked out really well for me; I'm really happy. I enjoyed all my days in the corporate side, but I think today I really enjoy working a little bit more creatively and independently.

In the last few years before you left, Sony did start to pursue more indie relationships. Were you an advocate for that at the time?

That was absolutely my directive. I restructured that entire third-party group and I brought people in that came more from the indie side of things than they did from the large publisher side. I really think it's an opportunity for large publishers. They're so focused on the bottom line and the big investment projects that they have, and they have a difficult time really identifying the key up-and-coming publishers and projects.

I felt that I could provide a spotlight on some of the more talented teams and make some of the introductions. But I've always been attracted to the creative nature of the industry. I mean, I started my career at Duracell battery company, and while I enjoyed that, I longed for something that was a lot more entrepreneurial and creative. I don't think you could get anything more entrepreneurial and creative than the games industry. In particular, the tip of the spear, in terms of independence and creativity, is indie publishers, so that's always been the area that attracts me the most. I just have a tremendous admiration for creative talent..

What's the transition to indie been like, as compared to your time at Sony?

There's a positive and negative to both sides when you're creating that big platform move where you've got a very large pool of resources, both human resource talent and financial resources, that allow you to pursue just the big-budget projects. But there's a lot of corporate limitations and there's a lot of corporate masters that you've got to serve as well, especially if you're creating a first-party game. Your primary goal is to differentiate the platform and to drive sales to the hardware. It's less about the commercial success of the individual title, or the creativity of the individual title. It's what are you going to do to serve the overall platform.

I think in the indie community, the exact opposite is true. You're obviously interested in bringing it to gamers of all sizes and shapes on as many platforms as possible. You're only limited by your own creativity and your own resources. But that's where the challenges come in. You're doing it with much smaller teams, you're doing it with smaller budgets. I think without exception, every indie publisher would tell you one of their biggest frustrations is, they had ideas to do even bigger and better, but they were limited by the amount of human resources and financial resources to really achieve the scopes that they would like.

But as they achieve more and more commercial success, and get more and more experience. They're able to expand the scope of their games. I think Blue Isle Studios is a perfect example of that. Not only have their games become more commercially successful as they went along, but they've grown dramatically in size and scope. It's a really heartening experience for us just to see the growth of the studio and the evolution of the creativity from what they started with to what they're ultimately able to achieve over time.

Most indie games would love to be on every platform that exists. What is the major bottleneck for a lot of indie publishers in your opinion?

The model for us is to start out on Steam with a PC version of the game, and given the current format, it's pretty easy to transition over to Xbox One and PS4. Then opportunities on platforms like Switch and ultimately mobile would follow that.

Steam is the platform that we advocate developing for first. It gives you the opportunity to get a taste of marketing acceptance and revenue generation through Early Access. You're really able to enlist the gaming community to give you valuable feedback and insights as to what they like and don't like about the game. If you listen and you execute effectively on Early Access, you put yourself in a good position to ultimately publish on Steam and Xbox One and PS4. That's basically the model for us.

In terms of bottlenecks, I think it's just that everybody is putting their game on PC stores, Steam in particular, trying to get noticed among the thousands of new releases that are available. You're struggling to try to get the attention of gamers and get the attention of the folks at Steam to try to accelerate the awareness on your game.

That really requires you to make sure that you come to Early Access with a really tight vision for your game and a well-executed Early Access release, and then to also have a very well-tuned social marketing strategy and communication strategy. To make sure that you're communicating with the audience and trying to get your game noticed.

Have you been in discussion with Valve about curation?

No question about it. That's one of the things that we hope that we bring to the table. I personally try to bring the relationships that I have with the platform-holders. I think there's a strong relationship with Valve, both at Blue Isle and with some of the members of our team, and we try to work really both ends of that and really try to bridge our relationships with the relationships of studios we work with, like Blue Isle Studios.

Having some initial credibility, either based on the success of the publisher or on your past experiences, gives us a little bit of an entry to try to call attention to the studios that we're working with. I think Valve has been incredibly supportive of the Blue Isle projects, as has Microsoft and Sony and Nintendo. So those are relationships that have been built over the last several years at Blue Isle directly and really over the last 25 to 30 years with people like myself.

For the Indie Games Fund, you're targeting 2-3 projects per year. Is that intentional to keep it intimate or limited by bandwidth?

We're trying to keep it intimate. When we originally went out to raise the fund, we got banking agents involved, and went out and did a road show with the intention of driving a much larger fund with a lot of investment outside the gaming industry. What I personally really found is that I would be spending the vast majority of my time babysitting investors and trying to explain gaming industry 101 to large financial investment firms, and that's not where my personal passion lies.

I want to spend the time with the developers and with actually getting the game successfully published. In order to do that, you need to have investors that understand the industry and you need to have a lower number of projects that you focus on. So you're not just doing lip service to a multitude of projects, you're really getting intimately involved with a handful of projects.

So we shifted the focus from a larger fund that was going to involve pitching at 20 projects a year, down to a smaller, more focused fund, and one that really took into account industry expertise with who we accepted our financial investments from.

Indie games run the gamut from small, personal or philosophical projects to games that 10-15 years ago would be mid-tier. It sounds like you're targeting more of the latter.

Yeah, I think there's more interest than ever in investing in the games industry, and there's a lot of money flowing in. Some of them are pure financial invest, but our investment is more of a hands-on consulting type investment. In terms of the potential targeted investments, as you pointed out, it runs the gamut from a studio that's just warming up and people that have never published a game on their own, to a much larger studio that has a large experience and has a lot of financial investment already and is looking for larger-scale publishing opportunities going forward.

We're probably in that mid-range but closer to the earlier stages, as we want people that have had an established studio and that have had some degree of commercial success before. But it's not scaled to the point where there's a limit to the amount of expertise that we can lend them.

We really want to be the main supporter and financial provider for the organization. We don't want a situation with too many cooks in the kitchen, because that gets really messy with different roles from different investors and different insights from different levels of expertise.

So ideally we're looking to be the only investor in a project that has some degree of commercial success, but they're probably in the earlier stages of what they're looking to accomplish as a studio long-term.

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Another topic that's been gaining a lot of traction is the developer crunch. Is that an element that you see coming up in these larger indie studios?

Absolutely. I think every developer deals with it, whether independent or whether they're part of a large corporation. I think that really comes down to advanced planning--what type of budgets are going to be required to accomplish the goals, what's the scope of the game, how are we going to accomplish various milestones along the way. The development process doesn't follow a defined recipe, and there are always bumps along the road that change and make it more complicated.

But I also think there's a real challenge and potential weakness to constantly coming up with new ideas and new innovations and things you want to do along the way. In the development process, that can get you sidetracked, push the ultimate goal of publishing on time and with any budget down the road. You have to make sure that you set very defined and relatively narrow expectations going in, in terms of what you're going to be able to accomplish in the scope of this game and still deliver it on time and on budget.

There's two ways of looking at it. One says that unrealistic expectations were formed initially and then people are being overworked to deliver what is unreasonable at the end of the day. I take real issue with people coming in and keeping unrealistic expectations on a studio or on individual people. But on the flip side, I think the creative nature in the development community really have to be harnessed to a degree, in saying, "We just don't have the time and we don't have the resources, we really have to narrow our focus, or we need to go back to the drawing board," which happens quite often, and say, "We're going to push the release date, we're going to expand the budgets, we're going to expand the scope. But we all agree this is in the best interest of the game."

A lot of people, when they reach that level of corporate head and then they leave a big company, they could probably just retire and live comfortably. You started a new venture, you're still out there. What are your plans for the future?

I love the gaming industry and I'm fortunate because I worked in it over 30 years; I'm a gamer like everybody else out there. I play games every single day, but I also follow the industry every day. I have to admit that as new consoles are coming to market, it's the first platform launch of a generation that I haven't been involved with since 1995. So I've got a great deal of interest in it and I follow it. I've got a lot of relationships personally with people that are still in the industry. So it's something that I can't get out of my blood in the short term. In terms of your traditional corporate career, I'm still relatively on the young side. On the gaming industry side, I think if you're over 35 then you're on the old side.

But I've still got a lot of energy and passion for gaming. I still feel like I've got a lot to bring to the table. And it's something that I personally take a lot of pride and enjoyment. Even if I wasn't working actively in the industry, I'd still be following it as somebody who's spent my career in it and somebody who still enjoys gaming. So there may be a point sometime in the future where I have other interests that take up more of my time than I can devote to actually working in the industry. But that's not happening any time soon.

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