00:00 – Bryan Schielke
You've led QA for both AAA games and indie titles. How do the challenges of ensuring quality differ between these two worlds and what lessons have you carried from one to the other?

00:09 – Josh Green
So the difference between AAA and indie is scope. So obviously on a AAA title, you know, there's a higher budget and as a result, it's a much bigger game, you know, usually. And so you're going to have multiple QA teams. Whereas in indie, usually there's just one QA team or even sometimes even just one QA person.

But the similarity between the two is the quality bar. At the end of the day, you want to maintain a level of quality that your players expect. And that doesn't change regardless of how big the project is or how many teams you're on or have. That's the most important part.

00:47 – Bryan Schielke
As a founder of Deadlift Studios, how did your experience in QA and live service operations shape your approach to building your team and company culture?

00:59 – Josh Green
So having been on a variety of teams, variety of companies, I've seen all sorts of different cultures. The one that I find to be most effective is one where people leave their egos at the door. It's a very, very important thing. The idea that anyone can have an idea. There's no idea person. Everyone brings something to the table and can be heard.

That's really important. The other thing that we're really big on—and I think more and more studios are getting involved with this—is a good work-life balance. Games traditionally have pushed 60 to 80 hour weeks. We like 40 hour weeks. We like having people feel like people are at their best when they're rested, feel good about what they're doing, and they don't feel rushed.

One of the ways that we do that is through planning and good production. There's a thing called crunch in the video game business—people doing huge amounts of work, very large hours, usually over a restricted period of time. Sometimes it can go for a year or more. We avoid that.

We make sure that when crunch happens, we know that that's actually the fault of management, not the workers. And so we take responsibility for that. We try to make sure that just doesn't happen.

02:21 – Bryan Schielke
Your LinkedIn mentions a focus on identifying a beachhead audience and engaging them. What strategies have you found most effective for connecting with and validating your games community early on?

02:37 – Josh Green
One of the things that I think a lot of game folks—especially folks that come out of game development but haven't done the business part of it—is you need to make a hypothesis of who is this product for?

Part of that is going out there and actually interviewing people. In our case, interviewing younger people, as our audience is more Gen Z, Gen Alpha. We don't tell them about the game. We ask them about games that are similar to ours. The idea is we're trying to validate our hypothesis.

Based on their feedback, it actually causes us to pivot and make changes in our game to better hit that audience.

Other things include talking to influencers in the community. Our game's a racing game, so we're looking at racing game influencers and Twitch streamers, as well as anime and cultural spaces connected to that genre.

We also go to local shows and sign people up to our Discord server. At the end of the day, the idea is to drive people toward our Steam page to wishlist the game.

04:00 – Bryan Schielke
You've mentored QA teams for years. What's the single most important leadership lesson you've learned from guiding other professionals in the gaming industry?

04:11 – Josh Green
Whenever there's failures, it's because folks in management haven't listened to the people who report to them. And also not listening amongst each other as well. So listening. Listening is the most important thing you can do in QA or any discipline in games.

It allows you to understand where people are coming from. You come up with some empathy. But you also want to make sure that they are heard by you. You don't talk over people. You listen to what they have to say and then respond.

You get very crucial information from people just by listening and not always talking.

04:55 – Bryan Schielke
Balancing technical rigor with creativity is a challenge in game development. How do you ensure innovation thrives without sacrificing quality?

05:04 – Josh Green
I'm going to talk very briefly about a very famous filmmaker, Orson Welles. He has a fabulous quote: “Without boundaries, there can be no art.”

It's the same thing in games. You introduce boundaries—budgetary, scope, time—and that’s a good thing. Especially as an indie studio, budget is really important. It forces us to drill down to the core gameplay elements that players want.

That’s its strength. We avoid feature creep. We’re not adding more and more features that dilute the core experience. Boundaries help keep that focus and keep quality high.

Even in high budget games, you can miss the core if you think you can do everything. Boundaries are what allow innovation and quality to coexist.

06:33 – Bryan Schielke
Looking back at your journey from QA analyst to CEO, what advice would you give someone aiming to make a meaningful impact in the gaming industry?

06:44 – Josh Green
The game industry has been in decline partially because people are not focusing on creating games that actually speak to a particular set of players or an audience. One of the ways to absolutely fail is to just make the same game that's already out there.

You want to find something that's new enough and find an audience that would be receptive to the particular game that you're making. Make it unique enough that it really speaks to them.

There are thousands of games released every year—often over a thousand per month on Steam. You have to make something that's unique and interesting, otherwise you're just going to get buried. That’s even happening at the AAA level.