Picking the winners you believe in
To end the second season of Game Dev Diary, Arslan Kıran was my guest for this week’s episode. He is evangelizing Web3 games and educating people about them as the head of growth at Sandbox and also working on a midcore game as the founder of Hungri Games. He has been in the mobile F2P industry since the early days and now is aiming to do the same with the Web3 games ecosystem.
As someone who joined the games industry right at the dawn of mobile F2P, Arslan saw the importance of having a finger on the pulse of the market. He was able to demonstrate his passion and genuine interest in games early in his career by always playing the new games and analysing them. This led to him having conversations with senior people in the industry where he got the chance to work on fairly large games. And this proves to be useful even more today as the games industry has grown immensely and it is much more important and difficult to see the market changes continuously. So, keeping yourself up to date with what is going on with the games you are interested in working on will be helpful at all times.
The first ever episode of the podcast with Mishka was mostly about the importance of picking the winners in your industry to grow with them through time. Arslan’s story is a lot similar to Mishka’s with respect to timing. So, the most important advice Arslan shares for people to grow their career is around picking the winners. He joined the early F2P movement that changed the whole gaming industry and has been the dominant force for a very long time. Although he enjoyed that ride since the beginning, it wasn’t a pure logical choice. Arslan strongly suggests that you should always pick the winners that you want to be a part of even without the immense growth opportunity. If you try to stick with something that you don’t enjoy only for the growth aspect, it will be hard to maintain a long lasting relationship with it. That’s why picking the winner in your industry that you also happen to believe in is incredibly important for your career growth.
Throughout his career, Arslan has worked under different departments such as Product Management, Business Development, and Growth. Although this wasn’t a planned transition, his suggestion for people is to be open to a multi-disciplinary career that enjoys getting experience from working in different roles. For example, by using his past experience and know-how in product management, he was able to grow his projects better as a business development person. And his experience in those two departments is currently helping him a lot with growing business with Sandbox.
This discussion proved once again that your choices with respect to the companies that you join impact your career more than you think. You always need to play a lot of games in order to understand the market and can try working at different departments to get different perspectives. But if you stick with a company or an industry that is not growing fast, your growth will eventually be limited by it. If you can spot growing teams that work on things that you also believe in personally, you will set yourself up for success right from the start.