 What's up chat? What's up YouTube man? How's it going really appreciate you guys you watching on YouTube? Please go ahead hit that like button Comment below on what you think of the podcast what questions you could have for Rex And maybe he'll check those out answer them as well. I appreciate you guys coming by here This is the needed podcast. This is episode 24 man 24 straight weeks of Tuesday night podcast action And this one actually has been something that I really wanted to do for a while now And that's really talked to somebody that was involved in Madden and somebody that we all knew well I'm really appreciate and that is Rex the man himself I really appreciate you joining the podcast and giving us a couple minutes to your time talk about Madden and everything That's involved with it. You're in me Yeah, no problem. Thanks for having me. Oh, yeah for sure. I'm I mean basically Pretty much a lot of me reaching out to you and I reached out to Clint as well Pretty much centered around, you know the patches that came up and how that kind of involves But first I want to say like what started you in into gaming like how did that become part of your life? Was this something you wanted to do? I'm I'm thinking myself like I mean you a lot older than me So I didn't think that if this was when you were a kid was this a career Choice for you or when did that become a part of your life this this largely? Yeah, I was a gamer as a kid all the way back to the Remember like my dad brought on the tarry 2600 home for Christmas and that's how it all started I'm sure he regrets that decision. Yeah You know all the way through from the Atari to the old 8-bit any And I started to get serious about it in college I was a communications major, but I did my minor in child psychology and I wrote my thesis paper on the effects of video games on children and You know, I had a corporate communications job coming out of college, but with six months I left that job and went and got a tester job with a claim claim and it came it was in New York and I worked on games like Turok and all-star baseball and NFL quarterback That kind of started my career and I've been in it ever Okay, okay, and so like when you started was like madden like we obviously you played football So where you always was mad and always like kind of the pinnacle of where you wanted to go with gaming Was that always like something that you would wish you had opportunity to work with? You know, I never saw that as an option. I was really into Madden and NCA starting back in college because you know, I played football for Marist 1 AA And we were all constantly playing on the Genesis always PVP You know competitive I had to head But I never saw it as a career option. I was always into shooters was my main thing and that's what I knew I was a level design never really saw an option for transitioning level design into sports gaming, but I Got an opportunity and I took it So yeah, I mean it was it was kind of a dream come true because NCAA football was always my favorite one of my favorite franchises of all time Spent, you know, 60 80 hours every single year on my franchise and NCA I played Madden, but primarily had to have And with roommates and stuff like that over the years. I also was into 2k on the dream cap I had a bunch of roommates and I was living in Arizona at the time and we rocked that game all the But yeah, I never expected to get a job in sports gaming. I didn't think the FPS skills would translate But they gave me an opportunity and so it kind of just fell into my life Yeah, but talk about NCAA because obviously as a Madden player for, you know, 15 years There's always something we played pretty much only the first month until Madden came out But I will tell you the online franchise or the online dynasty one year We really locked into that it was a great time and were you were you around the EA when they still had NCA? Yeah, so I was there for NCA 13 and NCA 14 Yeah, and I my job was gameplay creative director And so I at those times I had to build gameplay both for Madden and NCA So I got to work a lot with the team with Jeff Lure who was the creative director of NCA The guy named Craig Ostrander who was the EP of NCA We all worked pretty closely together NCA 14 was the year where we really committed a lot of resources. We redid the option Oregon ducks and Chip Kelly were big at the time So we built the spread option playbook, which was probably one of the most successful playbooks in Madden NCA history So yeah, it was a great great time for me. Okay for sure. So now why did essentially EA move away from the NCA franchise? So with a big company like EA it's all about risk assessment and with all the stuff that went on with the the lawsuits It just became I guess legally not worth the risk of continuing in other words Like the profits that were brought in by that part of the business were not risk Worth the risks of the lawsuits that could happen. They were afraid they were gonna get sued by all the different Now don't get it twisted. I'm sure that if EA had had the opportunity to pay players They would have gladly done They do so for all their other sports license But because of the NCA in the way it's structured, that just wasn't an option. So we're hopeful that You know as time goes on you see more government people start getting interested in getting college athletes paid And more and more people think that this is something that needs to happen My opinion that pays the way for NCA to hopefully come back as soon as EA is able to pay players for their likeness They're gonna do it. They're gonna jump right back So essentially they would wind up paying each individual player and then have their name on the game rather than it was before where it Was just a number and you had to download the roster. Yeah, that'd be my guess I don't I don't think they'd get back into it unless they could do that Because even if they did, you know, random generation or player editing you still open yourself up back to that risk again Okay, okay, but yeah, that was definitely something it kind of made the summer go by a little bit faster When you got that one month on NCA a would at this point as far back as they've pushed the man release I mean NCA would probably be the beginning of July would be pretty cool But anyway, so then we gotta get to Madden and pretty much Ultimately, we I want to understand like what Like who do you guys make the man game for essentially like who is your your target audience of the man game when you when you know when You develop it when you want people to play with them Who are you targeting the most of what what demographic of gamer or people? Honestly? It all depends on who you talk to I mean I think different people within the organization have different priorities and different people they want to take for example If I'm the executive producer of mutt My audience is very different than you know, the guy who's working on long shot And so I think at the top, well, you know a game that's top five best-selling in North America you want to target as big an audience as possible You want to target casuals? You want to target lapsed? You want to target? Or you want to target competitive? You want to target simulation? Because all those people are viable within the Madden community And you know, I think in order for them to continue to be successful You know that focus needs to get a little tighter because over the last three years especially I feel like the resources within have been spread too thin trying to cater to everybody and you know when he's kind of that That classic phrase when he tried to please everybody you end up pleasing nobody So I think a little bit more focus on the the core would be appropriate because you know Those are the people that have been loyal and by the game area and so you know from my perspective I'd love to see a renewed focus on giving those people what they want and and deserve Now ultimately when you were there, how much control did you have over the game in general? Like what was essentially your job when it came to Madden? So I had control of Gameplay. I was the gameplay creative director for the first five years. I was there The last year or so it's when I transitioned to have more of a franchise level creative Which is kind of like oversight over all the creative And that I was part of our process of trying to align everything against the singular vision instead of like five different teams all building their own And but you know during most of my time there I was mainly focused on gameplay and in terms of control the way it works is People will pitch what creative they're interested in investing in But what ultimately happens is only so many resources to go around and so ultimately it came down to Who has the most effective pitch? Who does marketing want to get behind? Who did the executive producers and the business guys think has the best idea for the year and ultimately that's the one those are the ones that get fun I do idea as far as what like different content in the game like long shot is an ideas That's something that was pitched and then you know they agreed on it. Is that what you mean by idea? Yeah, that's right different features like mutt would come in and want to do like You know training points or something like that and gameplay You know like real player motion And and based on the strength of those creative pitches It would sort of indicate how they spread the resources around and what they decided to and every year ideas get pitched that we just don't either have time for We didn't have resource and those things either get dropped or we hold them for another No Okay, so now I feel like you when you started and to where when you ended I feel like mutt really Multiplied by a thousand. I mean, would you agree with that assessment? What do you think? Yeah, I mean, uh mutt just started when I got there. I think the first year was 12 Yeah So 13, you know was my real first year there was only the second year of month and it really took off from underneath us which was It was sort of counter to what I originally Wanted to invest in I was very heavy on Authentic simulator. I came from franchise mode. That's where I mainly invested my time And there was sort of this predominant attitude when I got there that competitive madden was very hardcore and built for a a small Segment of our users that were really really good at the game and knew all the glitches in the And um whereas franchise mode was, you know, probably our most played mode And so a lot of my investment along with clinton who started the same year Was about building, you know an authentic simulation And it wasn't until mutt took off and we realized like the identity of mutt Largely built around competitive gameplay And then later on a year later when the mcs got And esports started that all of that started to shift underneath us Yeah, so then used to I would assume that you know mutt Obviously mutt probably is Is the biggest, you know money maker for the entire company as far as man's concerned So is that something that that you know the front office or whatever would push you more to You know really incorporate the mutt ideas more than some of the other ideas as far as gameplay or, you know CFM and so on and so forth Yeah, I you know the mutt team was always growing but um, you know They function a little bit differently. They're like a live service team So a big portion of their team is focused on like, you know, the next event the next promote It's a lot of front end stuff I think, you know the juxtaposition of understanding that Gameplay was directly in support of was something that took them a little while or wrapped their heads around And it took honestly us in gameplay We had to shift away from our simulation kind of folk and Start building towards, um, you know supporting mad and ultimate team A great example of that is a lot of the content that mutt puts out throughout the year We don't even see that stuff During development because you know, we add it during the year So it's like we we we had this classic conversation about like the big cards Like the 99 moss that comes out to be the like the bow jacks and stuff like that with the chemistries When we're in alpha and we're kind of getting ready to launch the game We haven't seen any of that stuff yet. We don't see it until like midway through the year And so we have less time to kind of prepare for what kind of impact that stuff has on Okay, so that's why so that would explain kind of how the aggressive catcher this year Maybe kind of got a little bit out of hand once they put this super moss and super Calvin in the game Rather than just a standard, you know, 88 Speck catch player would that translate to that problem? Yeah, yeah, and it's not just aggressive catch. It's like everything from like, you know, uh, you know, uh, Blown up spin move or a guy who's got, um Secure tackler versus some guy who's got 99 spin plus a fake outcome All those like systems trying to work together It's it's really complicated and it doesn't get as much testing time as it probably needs And so that's kind of why you see some of the outcomes that you do and probably also supports There seems to be a deterioration throughout the year in core sentiment Because the game always seems to come out at launch And everyone's like really happy and says it's playing really well and the more this stuff comes out things start to deteriorate Yeah, for sure. I've always thought that way too about man is that one when the game starts nobody really knows how to play Or nobody knows like the stuff that works very well or the stuff that's overpowered or anything And then both the combination of these new players coming out and people getting more hip to what's good at the game What will generally deteriorate the quality of the game essentially and uh That's that's pretty much how I always felt. Yeah I feel like social media also like kind of took off on us and we didn't uh We didn't really expect it like all the youtubers and the strategy guides and people putting out their uh, Their ebooks and stuff like that It starts to collapse the meta whereas now every You know playing what the most popular ebook is or they're they're playing what they see on youtube or on twitch and it sort of Like condenses everybody to the same play style And in my opinion that kind of hurts the game. We never really saw that coming it happened so fast that um, you know Something we had to react to But it was That's an argument that a lot of people have you know, and and my argument to me is like what's What's the difference to you know, somebody watching the pagers playing so oh they put amondola on a little whip route Let me try that with one of my receivers, you know, I feel like football is just similar to man They say it's a copycat league. That's just how madden is. I don't see why that that would be such a huge problem I think it's because the the game play especially Isn't at the point yet where you can have Uh an effective counter to every single You know what i'm saying? It's like when certain routes become money routes and certain formations become just what you play In my opinion, it's largely because we haven't invested enough or they haven't invested enough In sort of the counter plays and the counter behaviors that are necessary In order to ensure that every single offensive concept has a defensive counter That's something that clinton. I talked about all Yeah I mean Yeah, for sure. I definitely uh, the one thing I do want to talk about is when we were down there for the competitive summit was uh madden before madden 18 The one thing you had told us was that the game They make the game. They don't make the game hard until a month into the game. They keep the game a little easier You know, so people first get it they have more fun or they want to play it more But then when the first patch comes bang, that's when they tune the game to kind of ideally how they want to have it You hear me Um, I'm sorry you cut out there you finished the last part My part was yeah, like I said, I was down there You said that you know the first month of the game the game's a lot easier You know, so people essentially you want more people playing it You know and then once 30 day patch comes then that's when you might tighten the game up and make it more You know what you guys want completely Yeah, well, I think you know with the patches a lot of it is reacting to what we're seeing in the community And what you guys are complaining about and what's happening with um, a lot of the patches are kind of driven by that It's it's not only kind of like, you know, the bugs we shipped Uh, but it's mostly just reacting to what we're seeing online. Yeah, I'm trying to plug a headset and hope my audio gets No, you put a headset on you'll be all right So chat like I said, man, if you guys have any questions, man, let me know we want try to cover everything from patches to tuning To you know, I've always wanted to know did they throughout the year make the players worse So I had to buy new cards stuff like that. So any questions you guys have man, please put them in the chat They will be answered In their entirety dda, of course, I mean we will get to that. That's definitely I don't know how I feel about that I personally feel like the whole dda thing people just blame that for everything But I do feel like it's definitely something uh That would make sense to put in the game, you know, if I was making a game Honestly, we set back like if I'm making dubbys video game, right? I want as many people possible playing the game, you know, so little johnny down the streets getting blasted All right, I'm gonna make You good Can you hear me better? I mean, I hear you. All right So I'll tell you something about, you know, a little johnny and I know toke talks about this all the time um When we started mcs Uh, one of the things that was brought up to me was and this is you know brought up to me by an executive was if we're gonna invest in esports and we're gonna put all this money into um You know making sure that this this thing takes off they wanted the game to be less complicated They wanted to do things like make sure that it's not just the top 1% who can lurk and that's kind of what birth ballhawk and uh, you know a birth the nano detection system is Trying to make sure that competitive madden was accessible To a larger amount of people so that the investment that they were making in in the mcs Uh could and and that it wouldn't be reserved for like, you know, the best top 1% of all madden players And so, you know, that was sort of the executive mandate. It's like if we're gonna invest in this thing Uh gameplay team needs to go out of its way to make sure that you know, everyone feels like they have a chance to compete Um now we the way we kind of took that direction and what we did with it I'm sure a lot of people will be like Well, that you were wrong But I just want you to understand strategically and from an executive business position What the motivation was behind stuff like that? um, and you know the other part of I think if you think about something like uh, let's take madden 16 and what happened with uh stiff Winning the championship by throwing, uh, you know that bomb to gronk who caught it among three three of problems Yeah, um Competitive player will look at that and be like, you know A game shouldn't end that way a championship shouldn't be won that way But you gotta understand that like, you know, if you're an executive who's primary direct make the game accessible And being able to lob streaks to gronk is going to make the game accessible to a much larger pool of players And so that was deemed as a win and that was sort of my aha moment where I realized right after that happen Stiff came up to me and he gives me this big hug right this happened in the audience He gives me a huge hug and he says thank you. Thank you. Thank you And I knew in that moment that we had fucked up right I knew in that moment that something wasn't right about how that had played out And um, but you know, I also had a senior producer my boss coming to me and saying My nephew just loves calling hail mary four verts and throwing it up to gronk and just aggressive catching on mossing on everybody And I'm like, you know, I you gotta there's no way that I can please both masters And and ultimately, you know, we all have bosses and so if my boss Was thrilled at the way the aggressive catch and the catch mechanics and ballhawk turned out Um, you know, that was kind of what we had to roll with even though that was the beginning of me understanding That we were actually damaging Uh high level competitive So so pretty much stiff is little johnny. He's the same person I think like any competitive player is going to take advantage of the flaws that we put in the game and being able to throw Hold a button and and moss three guys Is unfortunately, you know, how you played that year and uh, it wasn't until the following year where we started to like Work on the swat mechanic and build that counter Uh that we were able to kind of like respond to what we were seeing um, but yeah, I mean I I sort of knew right after our midway through madden 16 that we had started to push the game in the wrong direction Based on our emphasis and e-sports Um, but not everybody there shared my opinion Yeah, I mean it makes sense. I've always said that man is too complicated. It really is I mean and obviously i'm always talking to man players who play it so they don't understand that is really too complicated I've always uh, you know made the comparison try to teach your girlfriend how to play madden Or try to teach them how to play rocket league or fortnite or whatever maybe madden is probably the most complicated game And because of that, I don't think it really has an audience in kids You know what I mean because it is too complicated and I mean if you're going to You know want more people playing the game you definitely have to make it easier or make an easier mode And I just want to talk about talk about going into the three different styles of play between the arcade the simulation and the competitive What was when did that decision? So, um, that was something one of my the exact Matt time and I had been talking about for quite some time My original concern with doing that was you know, get the size of the gameplay team wasn't really big enough to support all three simultaneously and that was my main concern But ultimately once we had a good plan in place, uh, we we decided to but um, you know Looking back now. I'm like even things like the nano system. Let's take that for an example and you might ask Why wouldn't you put that back on and compare it to play? and it's because like when you have an nfl executive and and All these executives from ea sitting in the audience watching Mike's grape or double loop screamers just died and they're like that doesn't look like real football Why is a guy flying through the agap on every play? It doesn't matter whether it's competitive or casual or simulation. They feel like that's a bad And so, uh, you know, that's one of the reasons why it's it's tough to It's tough to continue to uh, you know Push competitive in the direction we'd like to or we want I wanted to essentially A lot of decisions are made is how this game is going to look on competitive And how is it going to look now that that's does that go into you guys? You know trying to make bunch less does that so essentially when you're sitting in audience you say And you see everybody running bunch or so on and so forth So is that that just as disheartening as somebody running through the agap and sacking the quarterback It is for me. I mean it was for me. I don't know It You know, if you watch it on esp And you're sitting in a bar and you're you know, just some casual person. I'm sure it's fine But you know, if you're an avid watcher and you you kind of watch every game and you watch all the tournaments and stuff It does feel like a flaw at least it does to me I'm not sure that everybody shares that opinion But the fact that the game doesn't sort of Allow for for all these various play styles and and and people to develop their own unique way of playing the game Uh, and you could make some arguments, you know, I know The vy electrify had a sort of a unique style in the last tournament and a problem back in the day with his fallback dive offense Uh, I think that's actually good for the game Um, and I just feel like over time. We've we've lost a little bit Yeah, I mean well For me personally, I mean what what would go into okay? Now I feel like if something's a little I feel like you've removed more stuff out of other formations Then they have out a bunch, you know, and I don't know how much you were involved in okay This is too good. Let's take that out of the game or let's change this I remember when I went manbo, there was like four or five offense There were tons of different offenses that people ran And for instance like tight flex was one they had a sea route that was kind of unguardable And that's what made that offense kind of, you know Usable and then they would take that out and take this out and take that out It does what what decisions go into what gets taken out what gets changed So it's not as effective as it is in the next year Yeah, I would always try to opt for build a defensive counter to the thing super effective or uber effective I think in some cases when we realize that You know the investment it would take to build the defensive counter like for example, if we were to try to build something to stop The investment would be so significant that it would eat up all of our resources and so Sort of what let's call it the easy out would be, you know, just take slam outs out of And and so that's how so sometimes we we feel like we have an opportunity Like building a match defense to take away mountain routes or over the middle stuff And sometimes we just realize like hey, this play is too effective And we don't have enough time or resources to build an effective defensive counter So let's just remove the play until we can get back to building the defensive counter to this Okay In that instance somebody has to realize the more plays we we remove The more likely everybody that's good is going to have to run bunch For instance madden 18 the year after madden 17 They had one play that beat all these zones, you know So you kind of forced everybody to be in that one play, you know At some point you have to realize, you know, these guys are going to find something that's effective If we want the gameplay to be spread out and look better for the nfl executives Maybe let's leave Multiple things in there so they can pick and choose which one they want to run It will look that much better and they won't be stuck with everybody running bunch I mean, yeah, I think most of that is just due to compress And how all the coverage Is is less likely to have an effective response Compressed sets and again, it comes down to flaws in the defensive AI Or rules that that don't exist yet or systems or behaviors that we don't have in our AI yet That allows compressed sets to be more effective than other things And so everybody abandons the other things and just runs the thing that's most effective And again, if you talk about like, hey, what kind of investment would it take To make sure that compressed sets were as well defended as other sets It's massive like there's multiple features multiple systems multiple AI behaviors And I know they're working on that stuff, but it's going to come very slowly like in a trickle Unfortunately because they're working on other things that Getting into another topic are much more marketable Really hardcore fundamental football Well, I talked about I mean Obviously the one thing Madden Is up against more than any other game is the release date every year. You know, you just have X amount of months to make make a new game pretty much every year or tune another game and make it seem like a new game And so on and so forth talk about the challenges As far as that's concerned compared to all the other games you've worked on in your career You know, I would love to tell you that the time pressure was a It really wasn't it's it's not really about how much time we had because it's a fixed quantity. You know what it is And so you can take a set amount of work and fit it into that bubble The problem was is For me at least my perspective when marketing comes in or an executive comes in and says, well, I don't know if the story is big enough I don't know if there's enough back of box bullets You know, and then they start to inflate it Or they come in and they do this thing called an audible which is like you're halfway through the year You're executing just fine against what you wanted to and then someone comes in and no do this thing instead And that blows things up and that that becomes the problem because now you start chasing something else It pulls resources away from the thing you were trying to focus on um And ultimately like they're just going to make this big Like list of features every year because they're worried that if that feature list is small That people aren't going to come back and you'll get a bunch of laps And they're sort of stuck stuck in this cycle of believing that the longer that bullet list is the more likely it is that people will come back And unfortunately, you know a long bullet Doesn't necessarily mean a good game And so when you're trying to chase all these different ideas instead of really just focusing on make the best football game possible It distracts you And this goes all the way back to before my time if you if you go back in history During the e-incomings years they used to talk about one and done Where they put in a feature like protack, right? And then the following go away or A year after it would just disappear Because they didn't care about it anymore because they had already marketed it and they can't sell the same feature So as soon as it like comes out of the the back of box marketing focus It loses all its emphasis, right? So they could put like Millions and millions of dollars into long shot and market the hell out of it. And then two years later, it's going to be gone And and it's like well, what'd you get for all that investment? And and well, well we sold copies the year that it existed instead of yeah, we've invested in our long-term future They just they just don't think unfortunately About investing in these long-term initiatives because they want to see an immediate payoff By building these big back-of-box stories every year now, so I mean Well, let's talk about okay We'll talk about the patches and essentially where do you like you put the game out? So it's august 2nd you put the game out boom Where do you get the data? Where do you get the feedback? Where is like do you learn what we need to fix in the game? Yeah, good question. Um, so, you know, I kind of was the tip of the spear when it came to this You know the patch era sort of started with mutt and treating a live service because Live service gaming is all about retention