Sea of Thieves’ updates are transforming player behavior

Sea of Thieves is one of the biggest Microsoft releases of 2018, and during our conversation at the Electronic Entertainment Expo trade show, executive producer Joe Neate was quick to point to a wall of stats that all highlight exactly how big of a deal the online pirating simulator is. It has had 4 million players, a quarter of a million people all playing at once, and an average play time of nearly 23 hours per player. But Sea of Thieves is rapidly moving from successful launch into a support phase where developer Rare must keep dedicated fans happy with new content while also continuing to bring in new players.

I spoke with Neate about how Rare can support Sea of Thieves and a number of other subjects for a half hour last week. One of the aspects of development that he touched on most was responding to what players want, and then using data to see if the tweaks, updates, and content drops are addressing those concerns. And he explained that the studio is already seeing massive shifts in the way players are approaching the game after the launch of The Hungering Deep, which is its first free add-on.

“Our telemetry tells us that ship encounters ending in battles halved during Hungering Deep,” said Neate. “So we made our game twice as friendly during that time period.”

The Hungering Deep introduces the speaking horn, which is a new tool that enables players to communicate across the water with other ships. This is important because the add-on content introduces the megalodon shark, which requires at least two crews to take down.

Prior to The Hungering Deep, Sea of Thieves only encouraged one kind of interaction with other players’ ships, and that was combat. Unsurprisingly, that resulted in most people firing on other ships immediately. But Rare wanted to experiment to see if it could get players to work together, and that’s where it came up with the idea for the speaking horn.

Of course, you might think that giving players who would fire on each other a way to yell at other ships is a recipe for trolling and harassment.

“If you give players reasons to be good, they will be,” he said. “I’ve always strongly believed that. If you put players into a completely competitive environment, they’re generally going to use any advantage they can, any tool in their armory. I play Pro Evo or FIFA and I sit next to my friend and commentate all the way through to distract him.”

So to give players that reason to behave and work together, Neate’s team built the megalodon quest around cooperation. And that’s something Rare is going to continue playing with in upcoming events and updates while also introducing other new ways for players to interact with the world.

“So far we brought in the AI threat,” said Neate. “We brought in some small tools – the drum, the speaking trumpet, and the flag system. We brought in new goals around core time limited cosmetics. But what we didn’t do is enrich any of the ways to play the quest stuff. And so as we move on to the next update, okay, what are the things that we can bring in that fill those slots?”

And that’s how Sea of Thieves is going to grow for the foreseeable future. Rare will identify aspects of its game that it can change, improve, or add onto, and then it has four teams working on add-ons that will launch every six-to-eight wees. The Hungering Deep was the start, and now each team moving forward will have even more time to create something new for players.

“The reality of development is that the longer the lead time you give a team to deliver stuff, they’re gonna get more things in,” said Neate. “They get to do better prototyping at the start. They figure that out and then figure out what else they can fit in. Hungering Deep had about seven weeks. Cursed Sails is about 12. Forsaken Shores is 16-17 weeks. You’re going to see more in each update.”

And if each update can continue adding new verbs to Sea of Thieves’ gameplay, Rare may go from successful launch to successful ongoing service.

Here is the full transcript of my interview with Joe Neate:

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GamesBeat: Do those numbers mean a lot to you? Or are you just in the nitty-gritty of making sure the game is what you want it to be?

Joe Neate: A mixture of all of the above. With a game as a service, I’m learning to be a mixture of data-led and game intuition-led. My natural state as a human being and as a producer and everything else is experienced, hands-on, touchy feely, but with a game like Sea of Thieves, all the mechanics you can do that with, but how it works out in the wild and how players interact with the mechanics you put out there, it requires a lot of data and feedback and that whole mix.

It’s been fascinating, the transition from launch – and a successful one, if you measure by those metrics up there – to, okay, we had this amazing start, so how do we build on this and double down on it as a team? How do we take the top bits of feedback and react to them? How do we take the asks our players have about new things and new stuff to do and build that in and get it to players as swiftly as we can and in the right way for the game that Sea of Thieves is? It’s an exciting time, and one where I’m learning a fuckton.

GamesBeat: Do you feel like you have the game that can turn into that thing where, in a year from now, you’ll still have people coming in and you’ll keep the people you have now through the next 12 months? Or will you be able to bring them back in with regular updates? Do you think the game is in a position where it could easily grow into that? Do you have all the tools ready?

Joe Neate: 100 percent, yes. That is exactly where I feel we are. We’ve got a game that, broadly, has landed really well with a wide range of players. New IP, 4 million in the first two months. That’s higher now because we’re 10-11 weeks in. The broad consensus from our players is that this is cool, this is unique, we want more. More ingredients in the story, more variety of quests and AI threats and tools what whatever.

We sat down straight after launch, the first couple of weeks—it was mainly stabilizing everything and making sure it worked with the scale of players we had. Then it was, okay, take all the feedback in from all of these players, because we had a lot, right? I’m sure you saw it. Lots of people had an opinion.

But we then kind of sat down, myself and Mike, the design director, and Greg, the creative director, we all sat down and said, what are the top things players are saying? How do we build our road map out from there? Because we had a road map coming into all this, and then we just said—you learn so much from the millions of players playing your game. And so we’ve restructured the team to enable us to deliver content as quickly as we can on a regular basis.

We think for something like Sea of Thieves, having those new fresh things to do all the time, those are really good reasons to come back or stay around, and also good acquisition pieces, for new players, because they say, oh, wow, I wasn’t interested in Sea of Thieves, but now you’ve added this thing. Now you’ve added skeleton ships and AI stuff so I can do a ton of PvE again. We kind of changed our team into three teams now, so that there’s one team worked on delivering The Hungering Deep, one team’s on Cursed Sails, and one team’s on Forsaken Shores. Hungering Deep team delivered, and they’ve moved to the back of the queue.

GamesBeat: When you say the upcoming content drops are bigger, what does that mean? More stuff or a wider variety of experiences?

Joe Neate: Both. Ultimately, The Hungering Deep took about seven weeks to deliver what they did. We said, let’s get our first toe in the water of content updates.

GamesBeat: And The Hungering Deep team wasn’t working on this before launch? They were getting the game ready to launch and then fixing problems in the first days after release, right? 

Joe Neate: Correct. We’ve all been running toward launch, getting everything in that we could. And then a couple of weeks of stabilization across the team, and then, okay, structure is this. Team, team, team. You guys, we’re going for an AI threat in the world. That’s the main thing we’ll do it around.

But we wanted to bring in this little time limited campaign that had a bit of a — a kind of created quest, with a bit of craft, a bit of lore? To scratch that itch of players who’d like a little bit of story, a little bit of feeling like they’re being led on a journey. We wanted to try that with this campaign, and introduce the new mechanics with it, and see, does that work in our world?

Because we love the emergence of Sea of Thieves, the unexpected nature, but could we introduce a crafted quest that still feels emergent and different for everyone? And also, can we do something that makes player interact with each other differently? Rather than, whenever you see a ship on the horizon you get in a battle, can you get crews to cooperate?

GamesBeat: I like the idea of not having character progression so I can feel good about jumping back in with my friends whenever I want. But without introducing new skilltrees or whatever, where is the opportunity for introducing new experiences for players?

Joe Neate: There’s loads of areas. Basically, our road map has a number of different categories of features. And then each — going forward you have the categories, and then coming down you have the different content updates. The categories are ways to play. That could be new quest types, improvements to current quests, new ship types. All of those just add variety in the ways you play.

Then there’s new goals and rewards. Currently all of our goals are around cosmetics. What other things can we add into that — that don’t impact the power balance and progression of things, but what else can we do to give players new things to go and see?

The thing I think is most unique about Sea of Thieves and most special is the journey. Under that we have big tools, small tools, and threats. With Hungering Deep, if you think of those different categories, we brought in stuff in a few of those slots. We brought in the AI threat in the journey. We brought in some small tools – the drum, the speaking trumpet, and the flag system. We brought in new goals around core time limited cosmetics. But what we didn’t do is enrich any of the ways to play, the quest stuff.

And so as we move on to the next update, okay, what are the things that we can bring in that fill those slots? The reality of development is that the longer the lead time you give a team to deliver stuff, they’re gonna get more things in. They get to do better prototyping at the start. They figure that out and then figure out what else they can fit in. Hungering Deep had about seven weeks. Cursed Sails is about 12. Forsaken Shores is 16-17 weeks. You’re going to see more in each update.

We’re currently spinning up a fourth team, starting that in July. They’ll be tasked with the end of the year, December time frame. They’ll get about five months. Ultimately we’re trying to get to four, five, six month lead times for each team. We want to deliver every six to eight weeks in terms of content updates. I want to deliver every six weeks. Development reality might mean every eight weeks.

When we introduce those mechanics, we don’t want to just say, here’s a megalodon the world as an emergent thing. That’s cool. As the game plays, having that enriching the world, that’s great. That’s what the megalodon will become. But we want to give players this crafted moment in time around the introduction of new features. It almost gives you a guided tour of them in a cool way.

GamesBeat: Did the crafted story around The Hungering Deep work? 

Joe Neate: Yeah. Again, we were testing. Does it work? Does driving players together in a non-combative way work? Our telemetry tells us that ship encounters during Hungering Deep in Sea of Thieves — ship encounters ending in battles halved. We made our game twice as friendly during that time period.

GamesBeat: The idea of making changes to your game and then looking at the data reminds of something I’ve been thinking about games-as-a-service.  Does anyone know what they’re doing with this stuff? It seems like everyone comes out and the games meander for a bit, and then they find their way, and if the developer sticks with it long enough, it can finesse its game into something special. I think of Rainbow Six and Destiny, but Destiny 2 is struggling again, and it just seems like every developer working on one of these live-service games has no idea what is going to work and what’s not. 

Joe Neate: [Laughs] It’s an interesting one. You have to change your culture as a team and as a studio. We set out to do that at the start of this project, because we knew it was going to be a massive shift. We didn’t know what that was going to be, but we set out in a ton of different ways.

How we develop and how we get to a position to release regular versions of the game—we built up that muscle over about 18 months or 15 months in the weekly alphas and stuff. It meant that since we’ve launched, we’ve had an update every week with new stuff.

We also knew that we wanted to be open and transparent. For Rare, that’s night and day. But we set out there and knew we wanted to make videos, so we hired a video guy. John McFarlane came in, loves games, really good video skills, and we said, okay, let’s start recording stuff. We have videos from three years ago of us in meetings being really awkward because there’s a guy with a camera.

But we knew we needed to do this. We looked at, from a video perspective, the Double Fine stuff, the Double Fine documentary. Let’s take inspiration from that, because it’s great, the way they speak to their community. I think lots of indie developers have got into that rhythm of being open and transparent, but for a triple-A first party studio that was previously beholden to the usual way of talking about games and putting stuff out—to then just flip that on its head and say, we’re going to speak to our community, explain what we’re doing, explain what the game is, test things early, build a community—for a new IP, launching is the hardest thing.

We wanted to almost get to launch and have the fanbase, the awareness of an existing IP. That insider program, it ticked so many boxes. We could test our experience, a unique experience. We learned loads. We could build this engaged community about what our game is. When we hit the mass market and loads more people come in, hopefully, they can help educate, because not everyone’s going to watch all our videos and read these articles.

GamesBeat: When you talk about transparency, I think about the risk of saying too much — like No Man’s Sky. Hello Games got in trouble with fans because it said some things that didn’t come true, and do you think it’s a risk that fans could use something you say against you and your team?

Joe Neate: No, because — honestly, I think our approach has been — we were always careful about managing expectations with our players, and also letting them know that things will change. That’s the reality of games development.

Even our updates now, around Hungering Deep and the next one and the next one–we can talk in some level of detail about what’s in Cursed Sails, and a bit less about what’s in Forsaken Shores. The reality is we just finished prototyping the Forsaken Shores stuff. At the start of Forsaken Shores, I could say, we’re going to have a perilous world.

At the end of the prototyping phase I can say, we’re going to have a volcanic world that has tremors and the rocks raining down and it’s cool and it’s fun. You’re going to want to park the boat further away from the island. That’s why a rowboat makes sense here. We’re going to be able to definitely deliver those.

I also have a much better view of the smaller features that are going to fill the other acts that are coming in, because we’ve gotten through the prototype phase. So that’s how we talk about it to our community. We’ll tell them the high level and get into more detail as we get closer. It’s just — I think you have to understand how we’re managing community expectations and everything.

We learn all the time. Some of the things we’ve done — at launch, there was one thing we wanted to try and get in, which was death costs. If you die you lose a bit of gold or you have to pay the ferryman to come back into the world. We included it our notes at launch — “This is coming soon.” The community said, “Why? What the fuck? Why would you put death costs in?” And so we thought, okay, we messed up around that. A lot of the feedback was like — this stuff is experimental. We love to just fire ourselves out of cannons. We like to make crazy videos. If you’re going to punish us for that, we’re going to stop playing your game in the way that you like us playing it.

We said, that’s a really good point. Within like two days we said, look, we’re not doing this, it’s dead. We’d done the work, but we knew we’d miscommunicated it. We gave it the wrong context. It was the wrong time as well, at launch. It was a big mess-up on our part. We just said, we screwed up, we’re moving on.

But then when we had scale issues at launch, we would talk about them. We would tell people what was going on. People really appreciated that. And so with each of these things we learn. We put some cosmetics in probably a month or so after launch that were too similar. People said, this is bad. There was a massive cosmetics addition, about five or six of them were too similar and didn’t look varied enough. They honed in on that. This is not good enough. So we took them out, but now we have people saying, I want to complete that set! Right, okay, we’ll go and rework them and bring them back when they’re good enough.

Each time you learn. But broadly, just being open and transparent, letting people know what you’re doing—I don’t know if you’ve seen the videos I put out on a weekly basis. That’s me saying, what’s the top things on my mind in the studio now?

GamesBeat: It sounds to me that a live-service game has to be a relationship with the player, and as the developer, you have to communicate as part of that relationship. 

Joe Neate: Right. The most interesting thing, and this is a theory from my perspective — I’ve learned more about human psychology on this game than I think I’ve ever — if I’d gone and done a degree I don’t think I would have learned as much as I’ve learned making Sea of Thieves.

We’re telling our core community to watch those videos every week — which is a lot of people, as evidenced by the amount of people that keep bumping into me here — we try really clearly to set expectations. I was talking about Hungering Deep as a medium-sized content update that’s going to introduce a new threat. We wanted to keep the mystery of what the new threat is. But we let people know in the community — we put up a campaign page a week before that said what features were in it, what cosmetics and everything.

So before they went in they knew the size of this thing. We wanted to do that because we had less lead time on this than ultimately we want for updates, but we thought the value of getting new stuff out and testing something new would be great. But the key thing as well, we let them know that we wanted to try to do something to bring crews together in a different way, and we wanted to introduce the speaking trumpet and the flag system to aid in that. This is a communication tool to help you speak to people in the distance. Then, on the launch day of Hungering Deep, it doubled our CCU from the previous day. It obviously brought a lot of people back. But it also — that core community, the people that watch the videos, the people that take the day off to come play it, they were the first ones to come play it, and they all played it in the way we intended. They used the speaking trumpet in the right way.

I went in and played with a random crew and we were approaching Shark Bait Cove and there was already a ship there. Normally, when you approach another ship you’re like, uh… But you just saw this person swimming toward you with the speaking trumpet going, “hey, hey, we’re doing this! Let me come on board! I’m friendly! He came on board and we went to the map and he marked on the map the point where all the bits were that you had to go and do. You need to go to this place, you need to go this place.” And I was thinking, “whoa, spoilers!” [Laughs]

But he said, we’re going to wait here. We’ve done these bits, but we just need another crew to take the megalodon down, so if you go do this, if we’re still here when you get back, we’ll go do it together.

All of us as designers and team members went and played this. We all had our own different experiences. Shelley’s was another ship approached them and they just said, hi, this is Wendy’s, please place your order! Shelley said, all right, I’ll have a cheeseburger and chips please, and they said, sorry, we’ve only got bananas! We put it in as a communications tool. We knew people would experiment and have fun. When you use it, it filters your voice slightly to make it sound like a speaking trumpet or a megaphone. We knew people would have fun with it.

But it’s almost like — if you educate your core community, the people that will come back and be the first to play, if they start playing it in the way you intend, in the right way, that will just filter through the people the next day and the day after that.

GamesBeat: I’ve heard people complain about a lack of a tutorial, but you’re seeing this player-mentoring strategy work? 

Joe Neate: Yes. At launch we definitely had the biggest influx of players. It was somewhat overwhelming.

GamesBeat: For everyone, I’m sure.

Joe Neate: Yeah. But now we’re in this place where we’re running steady. We have the handle on our CCU. All of our services work. We’re releasing. We’re communicating. We’re operating as we want to, after we got through those crazy first couple of weeks. That broad design as we always wanted it is working. But we learned from Hungering Deep that people do want to play differently. They just need a reason.

They also wanted reasons to replay it. Let me have a little shark tooth that appears on the side of my ship each time I kill the megalodon. There was even a mockup on Reddit. We sent it around. It was really good. Whereas before we said, let’s just give them this crafted adventure and see how it lands  — would they want to grind it? It turns out that yes, absolutely, they want to. They like doing it. They like playing with different people and going and helping other players.

We learned that people like the crafted story bit, and that the crafted story still led to everyone’s adventures being different, because of the players, the things that happened, the tools along the way. And that people will use the speaking trumpet in the right way, if you educate them about it. Again, risky to add a feature that basically allows you to shout at people. [Laughs]

GamesBeat: Obviously, you didn’t look at that as a reason not to try something, or not to trust your players, because there are players worth trusting.

Joe Neate: Right. If you give players reasons to be good, they will be. I’ve always strongly believed that. If you put players into a completely competitive environment, they’re generally going to use any advantage they can, any tool in their armory. I play Pro Evo or FIFA and I sit next to my friend and commentate all the way through.

GamesBeat: But if you introduce content alongside a mechanic of cooperation?

Joe Neate: Exactly, yes. Now, for Cursed Sails, we could adapt our design to add more replayability to it. We could also adapt it to encourage players to cooperate against the AI threat coming into the world. We learned for that. Tomorrow we’re releasing our first event, the Build Your Adventures is what we’re calling them.

There’s a new character in the tavern you can speak to, and he sends you this series of adventures you have to take part in. Tomorrow’s is called Skeleton Throne, the first one, and it’ll last two weeks. Time limited rewards, time-limited everything. But we put 10 thrones in the world. Five big ones, five small ones. All you have to do is find them and get up to them. That generally means firing yourself out of cannons and trying to land in this area on top of a mountain. If you just sit in it, you’ll be rewarded. But half of them are — small ones you can do on your own. Large ones, you have to find someone else and another crew, and you have to get up there and sit in it together.

We’ll see how that lands. Does that drive the same kind of behavior? Again, give people reasons, and you’ll find other people going out there looking for these things.

GamesBeat: Is it OK if these new ideas fail?

Joe Neate: Well, we’ll learn, and we’ll adapt it to the next new content. With Hungering Deep, we obviously playtest the quest bit. And so we can say, yeah, people are going to solve these riddles, that’s okay, we can get enough people through that. We can playtest the megalodon and say, we think this is balanced right, because we’re playing it with two big ships.

But ultimately someone could get there as a five on just a galleon, or you could get six galleons—how the fuck do you balance that? What’s going to be the most likely occurrence? And so we have to put these things out into the world with a degree of uncertainty, but then we go and play it with our players and say, cool, this worked, and this didn’t. It helps influence the next decision and the next decision. You can’t re-create four million players inside Rare, sadly.

GamesBeat: You guys do go out and play it, so you’re not just looking at the data?

Joe Neate: It’s got to be both.

GamesBeat: Do you think it’s a risk, getting in a situation where you over-rely on the data?

Joe Neate: It’s our skill as developers to figure out what the data means. When people were misusing the brig, the punishment mechanic, if they were behaving badly in the crew — people were misusing it. And the reason for that was because we hadn’t given them enough crew management mechanics in terms of allowing you to say, I just want three players.

We then did the public/private matchmaking, so you can now close your crew off or open it up to have randoms in. You can do it in-game as well, publicly, on the fly. As soon as we put that in, the use of the brig halved, from four percent of sessions having a brig usage to two. Customer service complaints stopped. Community complaints stopped. We said, okay, fantastic. We used data, but we also used other areas where we get information. It was investigating and realizing, it’s got to be that. We don’t need to add a new system. We don’t have to do anything to the brig. We just have to give better controls over a different part of the game. It’s like a crime scene investigation. You have all these bits of evidence, and you have to say — what’s really good about data is you can generally use it really well to see if you’ve changed something and solved it. That’s when it’s almost at its strongest.

GamesBeat: You have to be the detective and put it all together.

Joe Neate: One of the really interesting data points we found early on — which was against our expectations, actually – was that if you were using voice, and you were matchmade with other players with voice, that would be the longest, healthiest session. That was obviously our expectation. If you were matchmade with some people using voice and some people without, we thought, well, people can talk, so that will still be an okay thing. Some people will talk and some won’t. And then the bottom one where no one’s talking, and there’s no way to communicate because there’s no non-verbal conversation, that will be worst session.

But it was actually the middle one was the worst one, because you had two conflicting motivations. In hindsight it makes total sense, but when we looked at it before — so non-verbal comms was already in our plan, but that accelerated it. It also meant, doing matchmaking, if you have mics plugged in, we’ll try to match you with other people that have mics plugged in. If you don’t, we won’t. That happens in the background.

Again, that contributed to the brig usage as well. If you’re being matched with someone who’s talking and you want them to talk, well, fuck off, I want someone else. Doing those two things has meant that that isn’t one of our top five issues anymore. It’s not anywhere near.

We always have this flowing top list of feedback that changes based on what we do. Things at the bottom now will bubble up higher as we solve bigger things. It’s fascinating, day in and day out, every time we do something. We’ve built a rapport with our community and a relationship with our community. Honestly I think a trust as well. There will be things that change.

We’ll make mistakes. But we’ll tell people about them and acknowledge it and tell people how we’re going to improve things and make them better. I think it’s critical to this type of game. Even just launching a game like this, the difference between expectations from a player in an alpha or a beta to a paying customer post-launch, they’re very different. The feedback you get is different. You almost have to launch to get the feedback you need to take the game forward. We could spend another year just developing in isolation, in alpha and beta, and we wouldn’t have anywhere near as good an idea of what we need to go add or what players really want.

We’ve made better decisions around our road map based on watching and based on getting feedback. We’re now delivering the stuff that players really want as swiftly as we can, based a lot on what the feedback was and how they’re playing.

GamesBeat: So you’re a game as a service, but you’re part of Game Pass. That feels like a major reason you don’t have microtransactions yet. 

Joe Neate: We don’t do it yet. Revenue is a thing for us, and we do have a plan to add things in the future. But when is TBD.

GamesBeat: But it feels like if you get people to buy into Game Pass, that feels like a win in itself.

Joe Neate: Yeah. Our measures of health are revenue, a mix of engagement – how many people are streaming, how many people are using that service – and Game Pass. In terms of people who are subscribed playing our game and driving conversion.

GamesBeat: But even if someone buys Game Pass just thinking: it’s good to have this because I might want to play Sea of Thieves one of these days — even if they’re not playing every day, that’s still valuable to Microsoft and other Game Pass games.

Joe Neate: It really is. Our community is a mix of people from everywhere. We don’t separate them out. If you’re playing the game — monthly active users, weekly active users – that’s super valuable to us. Because if you’ve got people playing your game, they’re sharing stories. They’re creating awareness and impact. Just that is going to drive more people toward Sea of Thieves.

When we add a new feature, add new stuff, they’re going to share it, share their stories. We’re going to get that buzz around it. We saw a spike with video creators and streamers when Deep came out. We saw more people come in. We saw a bit of revenue. There’s lots of different moving pieces. There’s not one bit that’s the pressure point. It’s a balance. Again, that’s new to me.

GamesBeat: Are you waiting on microtransactions to get the game to a certain place or to find the right way to do microtransactions?

Joe Neate: We’ve talked openly beforehand, before launch, about how we’d be bringing in microtransactions after launch. We want it to be fun and social and silly. Pets were the first thing we wanted to do, and then with launch and with people wanting to see more stuff in there, we said, okay, cool, let’s focus on the stuff players are asking for.

Our focus for the next few updates is that, and we’ll just assess. It’s funny, because we’ve been doing fan meet and greets here. A couple of times a day. I’ve got one later. We’re inviting fans. They get a wrist band. They just come and sit round tables and we chat. Yesterday morning a bunch of them said, when are you bringing pets? We want pets. I want a monkey. I want to spend money.

It was the weirdest position, where I was saying, sorry to disappoint you, fans and players of our game, but we’re not going to allow you to spend money in the game just yet. [Laughs] It’s just when we feel it’s right, from all that mixture of data and everything else. It’s in our hands, basically, and we’ll do it when we think it’s the right time. We’ll be open and transparent about it.

GamesBeat: You have the luxury of waiting?

Joe Neate: Exactly. We do. We’ve made a bit of revenue. We have very healthy numbers everywhere. It’s in our hands as developers. We’ll tell people and be open about it, because that seems to be working.