Game’n Breakfast : Freddi Malavasi

Welcome! Welcome to another episode of Game’n Breakfast with Freddi Malavasi. The name probably doesn’t mean much to you. If I say Draw Me A Pixel, it might ring a bell. But when I mention There Is No Game and its famous ‘Hello User’, it really rings a bell. This game comes from the Lyon-based studio that piqued my interest with the richness of its first title. So I came across Freddi, currently associate producer and communications manager, and as usual in GnB, I got to know the person behind the name. What a pleasure! We talked about his job, of course, but also about his arrival in the world of JV, which was full of pitfalls and twists and turns. And then there was the inevitable commentary on the industry, including, for the first time, an ecological aspect. So as not to spoil the pleasure of discovery, I’ll stop here for the introduction and let you browse through the lines that follow. I’ll see you at the end to find out what’s next in this section.

For Freddi, working in video games was an obvious choice from an early age. As early as primary school, when his classmates wanted to be firemen, footballers or actors, he already wanted to be involved in game testing. Of course, the adults had a ready-made answer: “playing video games is not a profession”. Add to that the fact that he had failed at school, and a few years later he went on to do a BEP (vocational training certificate) in metal structure, the manufacture of gates and ocean liners. Not exactly the path he had envisaged. One summer evening, he came home with a blackened face and his hands full of cuts, and it was time to think: was this really the job he wanted to do? The answer was an immediate “no”. He headed for the ANPE (now France Travail), where he consulted a catalogue of unqualified job offers. His eyes fell on an offer for a security guard, a branch in which he would work for five years. But he still wasn’t having the time of his life; it was more like depression. The advantage of this job was that it left him plenty of time to read, and novels and magazines flew by at breakneck speed, including the JV press, including a certain Joystick (old-timers will know). One day, following a number of departures, the periodical announced that recruitment was open. It was the perfect opportunity, but he was turned down because the team was supposedly full. Freddi didn’t give up though, so he wrote news for his mates, in Steam groups, in short, he wrote. The English-language media give him fresh news, which his dozen or so friends are happy to get quickly, in French, thanks to him.

The legislation governing security guards is evolving to introduce a compulsory diploma. A training company where a friend works offered Freddi the chance to become a trainer. It was an opportunity to change jobs for something more rewarding, as a security guard spends most of his time waiting. Freddi holds those who work in security in high esteem. He will be a trainer for about two years. In the meantime, he met Omar Boulon, working at Canard PC at the time, who ended up becoming a role-playing partner. From time to time, Freddi would send him papers he thought were worthy of interest, as free-to-play was just emerging at the time (Editor’s note: We also spoke with Sébastien Bénard). Then, one day, Omar contacted him because the newspaper was planning a special issue on this particular genre and no one in-house had the necessary knowledge. The problem was that it was a two-month temporary assignment and Freddi already had a job. The boss of the training company, not wanting to stand in the way of his dream, grants him unpaid leave. He remembers, when he handed in his first text, feeling a bit sick to his stomach with the sensation that his destiny was at stake, without being sure of the quality of the work he had produced. It was a resounding success, with the special edition sold out after two months and selling very well indeed. Jérôme Darnaudet, the director at the time, was pleased with Freddi’s work. Although the magazine didn’t have room for him on its full-time staff, he was offered a freelance position. He was to combine freelance work with training for some time. Then came the phone call he’d been hoping for since childhood: a vacancy had opened up in the editorial team at Canard PC and the job, if he wanted it, was for him. He resigned from his position in the training company to join the media, where he stayed for fourteen years.

Freddi has held all the positions you’d find in a newsroom: freelancer, journalist, newser, deputy editor-in-chief, editor-in-chief. When the digital age arrived, he became a streamer, columnist and host of the programme Canard PC. In other words, he knows a thing or two about video game journalism and, by extension, communication in the broadest sense. Let’s not forget that, after gamers, journalists are the main target of publishers’ and studios’ PR people. But it’s just that the feeling of having covered everything, of having said it all, is starting to be felt. Freddi didn’t want to be the guy whose passion fades and ends up losing what makes his papers so good. He might as well leave as the guy who’s going to be missed rather than the one who’s being gently pushed out the door. Not to help matters, there have been some difficult moments, nothing to do with the company itself, let me explain. It all started when he was appointed editor-in-chief, a fine promotion, but COVID arrived three months later and magazine sales collapsed. The question of survival arose, because even if the magazine was well managed, the cash flow could not be sustained indefinitely. An important concept to remember is that the paper press is a habitual purchase, for example, I go to get my coffee, and on the way I stop at the press office. If the magazine is no longer available, the habit is replaced. It’s hard to win back a lost customer. At the time, Freddi felt a bit like regaining the rank of colonel when a major conflict broke out. He finds himself having to manage a newsroom in crisis. Unsurprisingly, his health and morale took a beating over the next two years. The unmanageable fatigue sounded the death knell for his journalistic career. On top of that, for some time his PMs had been receiving a steady stream of offers from studios and publishers to join their teams. Up until then, he’d paid them no mind – he was happy where he was. Now that the situation has changed, Freddi is listening a little more carefully. So he started making phone calls and the replies were not all that positive. The small studios told him that they would be better off with a big one, while the big ones advised the opposite. Finally, he was put in touch with Sophie Peseux, Director at Draw Me A Pixel, to help him review his CV. His profile was a hybrid, evoking both communication and project management. She advised him to create two CVs, one for communications and one for production, and to send the one that best matched his profile, which he did before returning it to Sophie for a final proofreading. Two months later, Draw Me A Pixel was in desperate need of a producer, and with the departure of the head of communications, Sophie set off to find someone capable of managing the comms and a team, a five-legged sheep in short. After several days of searching, the perfect CV flashed before her eyes. So Freddi joined Draw Me A Pixel for his first job in a video game studio.

Let’s look back at the history of Draw Me A Pixel. The studio was founded by Pascal Cammisotto and Sophie Peseux. It all began with a game jam at Newgrounds, a mecca for flash games during their golden age. It was 2015 and the theme was deception. Pascal came up with a game called There is no game. The idea hit the bull’s eye, winning the jam. It came as a big surprise, as he had originally just wanted to win the Xbox that was up for grabs. It was a success that went beyond the closed circle of jammers, as YouTube began to pick it up. Pascal decided to seize the opportunity and so Draw Me A Pixel was born in 2017. In the meantime, in order to raise the necessary funds, he launched a kickstarter in 2016, which wasn’t a great success, raising only 10% of the amount requested. Fortunately for them, and for us, the project convinced people who were prepared to invest their own money and work without being paid. Guillaume Vidal joined the team, forming a trio of veterans of the JV industry who gave life to the point’n click we know today. A little anecdote: some fans call the commercial version There Is No Game 2, even though it’s only the complete and final version of the jam game. And let’s be clear, the second episode is not on the programme at all. In the months following its release, sales failed to take off. Then a US streamer launched the game, and it exploded. Streams followed streams, the media picked up on the hype, the machine went into overdrive and the game was a success. More importantly, the studio found financial stability because, as a reminder, nothing was coming into the coffers until then. This success has enabled the studio to think about what’s next, with a second game in the pipeline and the recruitment that this implies. Today, the team is made up of nine people. That’s a big step forward, but the studio isn’t aiming to grow any further than that. In terms of how it works, the studio has two particularities. The first is that the team works 100% from home, with shared hours and days, but with a margin of tolerance to adapt to each person’s pace of life. Secondly, there’s a real sense of ‘jack-of-all-trades’. When Freddi arrived, he did game design with Pascal two days a week. So he helped design puzzles and mechanics, even though this wasn’t originally his job. Today, with his background as a journalist, he sees himself more as a gameplay therapist. He’s not going to come up with solutions, but rather provide food for thought, get the team talking, and try to make them understand what’s not working. Because, while the job of game designer requires very different skills, fifteen years of analysing games gives you a critical eye. We agree that developers are aware of what they are doing, and a team is rarely surprised by a project that receives a lukewarm reception from the media and gamers. Even so, a little help to sit back and reflect on the work in progress has a positive effect on a production. The aim of this versatility is not for the sound designer to do 3D modelling, but rather for the emergence of a problem to lead to team reflection in order to resolve it in the best possible way. This way of working brings a sense of goodwill to the studio, not just kindness, but a real desire to move forward together.

It’s a perfect opportunity to move on to the next part of our interview and talk about Freddi’s different roles. The direction in which the team is moving is partly down to the producer on a project, and just as well, he’s associate producer at Draw Me A Pixel. He describes himself as the weatherman of the studio’s schedules and smooth running. The main role of this job is to make sure that the deadlines set in advance are met. To do this, the estimate has to be right, a bit like predicting the weather. To do this, Freddi relies on factual information: who is working on what, and for how long, so that he can extrapolate what’s coming next. Beyond the concrete, you need to have that little feeling of knowing that someone who thinks they’re going to be late is going to finish on time and that, on the contrary, someone who thinks they’re on time is going to be just right. By zooming out, you need to know where each section is (programming, sound, artistic direction, etc.) to then determine the progress of the overall production. If a bottleneck is detected, it must be clearly identified and effective solutions proposed. Freddi must then bring the problem to the attention of the production team so that a concrete solution can be applied, such as hiring new staff, revising deadlines or even reducing the scope of the game. It’s common, during production, to have to stop and think about what you can keep and what you have to take out of the initial project. A good scope is the cornerstone of a finished project. For Freddi, if you want to manage production properly, you have to define it in terms of two curves, that of what you know about the project and that of time, which always end up intersecting. He tries to pinpoint this precise point because we know quite a lot and there’s still time, so it’s the ideal time to check on progress and determine whether we need to adapt for the rest of the project. As far as the famous milestones are concerned, these are generally set by an editor. As Draw Me A Pixel is totally independent, they set the pace themselves, so the few checkpoints that exist can be adjusted. The real deadline is when the budget is exhausted, because the cash flow is not unlimited; we’d say that independence allows greater flexibility. This mutual support means that Freddi, who is in the middle of a career change, has a margin for error and can turn to the team if he runs into difficulties, rather than trying to hide them. In no way does this impact on the rigour of the work, it’s the comfort that really benefits.

We take a look back at the principle of participatory funding to get the opinion of a producer. Is it really a good way to finance your game? For Freddi, it was at a time when Kickstarter was all the rage. We all remember the campaign for Shenmue 3, which was so successful that Sony decided to finance what was becoming an oracle. The appeal of novelty was important. But with the passage of time, and projects that were financed but never released or were of dubious quality, gamers have become increasingly cautious about taking part. These days, potential participants are much more observant, and this tool has become a method of communication rather than a means of obtaining funds. In the age of social networking, controlled posts are far more effective than participatory financing. Even if it can be a crutch, a start to funding for early access, the era of campaigns that raise millions of euros is over. When you look at it in more detail, today’s counterparties are more bonuses or goodies than a complete production, and have become a means of interacting with a community.

Being a video game developer in France means you can take advantage of a range of funding opportunities. Draw Me A Pixel was able to benefit from a grant from the Centre National du Cinéma et des arts numériques (CNC) for the game currently under development. To talk more broadly about funding, there are two that stand out. The first is the intermittent status and unemployment insurance (editor’s note: in 2023, it was estimated that 16% of the workforce would have intermittent status). Freddi believes that many small projects would not have seen the light of day without this. In the case of unemployment, the idea is to free up time to design your own game. The second is a range of technical aids such as the CNC, as well as a whole host of regional or departmental funding often subject to conditions. Freddi sees the CNC more as a helping hand to finish a production because it only represents a percentage of part of the budget (for example, 10% of the writing budget). For him, there’s a downside, because the big studios are aware of this aid and don’t hesitate to use temporary workers and then throw them out, not to mention unemployment. But a CV that looks like a slice of Emmental cheese is no help in finding a new job. To sum up, we’re pretty well off in France, even if over the last year there has been a desire to reduce benefits in the broadest sense. However, when you look at a country like Canada, where support is also substantial, the number of expatriates and French-speaking studios is proof that this is an attractive area.

It’s only logical that we should move on to Freddi’s second job, that of communications manager. What’s interesting is to see how he manages his communications when the studio doesn’t yet want to talk about the current project. His main objective is to keep the networks alive so that they can have a real impact when the next game is revealed – in short, not to lose their identity. The solution he has found to maintain recurring activity is to surf on the popularity of memes at least once a week. It’s a good way of creating interaction with the community. Although There Is No Game is a small, linear game, players are very attached to the universe that has been created and to the people who created it. The recipe works because accounts with a few thousand followers don’t, as a rule, systematically exceed a hundred likes. The community is hungry for this content. As a communicator, Freddi is just a humble servant, so he responds to demand. To do this, he creates and adapts memes that go viral. The fact that he’s funny and a bit up to date with network news means that he can bring out the humour that was already present at Draw Me A Pixel. On top of that, it relays the various promotional offers around the game and makes a call to action, which can be summed up as “come and follow us here or there”. This variety helps to keep people on their toes so that content that’s too repetitive doesn’t end up becoming invisible. The question that comes to mind, given that they’re not working on a sequel, concerns the difficulty of breaking away from the image of the first game for the second. Freddi’s answer is that a studio always keeps the image of its successes, but for a small studio, the DNA is only complete if you include the people who created that success. As long as Pascal is at the helm of Draw Me A Pixel, the games produced will have his touch – he basically likes to make people laugh. All this to say that even if the form changes, there will still be the substance that made the success of There Is No Game in future productions and that the tone found on the networks will not change.

It seemed obvious to me that this exchange was a good opportunity to ask for advice for a small studio that doesn’t have a community manager on hand. For Freddi, the starting point is to admit that you can’t control everything. Communication is about trying to control luck, and algorithms don’t fall for it easily, which leads to situations that can be bizarre and even frustrating. You can’t give up. One mistake he often sees with small studios is that the account is managed as a personal account. While it’s great to create a close relationship with the community, you have to remember that you’re representing a company. The search for a nanny to look after Timéo on Saturday night has no place here. I can see you smiling, but it’s important that the message conveyed on a social network is clear and consistent.

To return to the subject of the JV industry, we discussed the future, starting from the difficult context we’ve been observing for several years now. For Freddi, it’s a veritable bloodbath, with new redundancies swelling the ranks of professionals looking for work every week. It’s not just the latest arrivals who are being sacked once their work is done, but also senior staff who are in dire straits. Not that mass redundancies among junior staff are normal, but until now senior staff have had no problem finding work – quite the contrary. Video game design is a demanding, tiring, invasive profession. The crunch never leaves you unscathed, and the pay isn’t necessarily up to scratch, so few people really make a career in this industry. Freddi believes that two things will determine his future. It was at this point that his green credentials came to the fore, and rightly so. At a time when water resources are uncertain in the medium term, as is access to other resources, the industry is turning a blind eye, burying its head in the sand. The time has undoubtedly come to question the impact of video games, both on the developer and the player. The race to make games bigger and bigger, better and better looking, less and less optimised, requiring more and more energy-intensive hardware or using artificial intelligence, is becoming an aberration that is hard to ignore. We remember a time when the constraints forced some people to fit a 3D scene onto a floppy disk of just a few megabytes. Capitalism is now being applied to JVs, and the mergers are becoming ever stronger. Smaller studios, for their part, want to make sure they can keep their full complement of staff, and are also entering this race for money as the number of releases soars every year. If we keep up the current momentum, the risk in the not-too-distant future is of having to choose whether to run your computer, fridge or air-conditioning with a thermometer reading 45°C. Which brings us to the second subject Freddi wanted to address, the decline of JV. In his view, we’re at a stage where the policy of games with ever-expanding content and exploding budgets is nonsense. We’re at a time when a project is described by management as needing to generate 15% more profit than the first, which may mean a reduction in the wage bill. In short, it’s a case of producing more but with less. And so the only answer to offer is, surely, the decline of the JV industry. In concrete terms, it would be a good idea to concentrate on games with a smaller scope and smaller teams. Take, for example, Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, a small game for Ubisoft, but one that met with unanimous critical success. As far as commercial success is concerned, a flagrant lack of marketing, which is something of a recurring problem for the Breton publisher, is often to blame. After all, the metroidvania genre remains a niche, and the dissolution of the team, who had expressed a desire to work on a sequel, was due to a profitability objective that was not suited to the product. Have we already mentioned capitalism? We’re a long way from the profitability target, we need to feed the shareholders. To conclude the pamphlet, indie games have a role to play in this degrowth imposed by the economy and ecology, and the market is likely to change (Editor’s note: I refer you to the video by Zeph and Ramo). It’s hard to imagine where the industry will be in five or ten years’ time, but gamers are increasingly ready for ten-hour games for twenty-five euros that break away from the big prefabricated licences that have been reproduced ad infinitum. Titles like Balatro are proof that an original idea can stand up to the big AAA titles. For Freddi, the JV industry is a victim of its own ambitions, and a return to humility seems necessary. A project that pays for itself and allows us to look forward to the future with peace of mind is a great success in itself. A thirst for international success and profits in the millions should not be a prerequisite for a game. If we come back to the senior citizens we mentioned earlier, this frantic race for ever more is wearing them down. Marc Albinet talked about this in our exchange. Add to that the projects that are cancelled after several years of development, the terrible feeling of seeing an enormous amount of work thrown away by people who have no idea of the personal investment it represents. And then we’re surprised that people don’t go on to have long careers… We could also talk about the big shots who treat themselves to cars and bonuses at the same time as laying off dozens or hundreds of employees, leaving the survivors with the burden of ensuring the studio’s survival. It’s a breath of fresh air to be able to talk to indie studios that are close-knit, often in difficulty, but that are facing up to the situation together. But we mustn’t forget that if indie games are what they are today, it’s also thanks to the support of certain publishers and manufacturers such as Xbox, Playstation and Nintendo, who have promoted these smaller productions and given them access to a wider audience. This is one of the reasons why we can see a flight from the big studios to smaller teams, which also guarantees greater creative freedom and the end of multiple approvals for a single idea. We can also talk about the back-pedalling of the behemoths concerning teleworking, which was sometimes a reason to take a job. Most freelancers are much more flexible in this area too. This was one of the reasons for the recent strikes at Ubisoft. Remote working reduces a lot of costs for both the employer and the employee, and it’s good for the planet. On the other hand, it’s a bit more complicated to apply pressure.

There’s one subject close to Freddi’s heart, and that’s the plight of juniors in the JV industry. For anyone who’s been sending out CVs for months, you need to hang in there. Even if, for whatever reason, you need a food business, and he knows what he’s talking about, you have to keep your hopes up. What can make the difference is perseverance. The job market is very complicated, but also saturated. The schools that have sprung up in a short space of time are producing far more graduates than there are jobs to be filled. A small studio like Draw Me A Pixel, which offers a job, sees around fifty applications land on its desk in a single day. Freddi remembers that at Gamescom he was talking to the boss of a medium-sized studio. He put out a job advert and in the space of a week received three hundred e-mails from applicants. So much the better, you might say. Once all the CVs had been sifted through and those that didn’t match had been discarded, there were still a hundred candidates on the table. It’s impossible to interview all of them to refine the process as much as possible, so it’s left to chance. It’s unfair, but the alignment of the stars plays a role in getting a job, and it also explains the years of hardship for the others. To multiply your already meagre chances, you need to build up a network, go to trade fairs and conventions, meet associations and talk to people, because a good proportion of jobs are filled before the advert even goes out. You have to be in the right place at the right time. Freddi is a living example of this: if he hadn’t been introduced to Sophie, a vacancy would have been posted and perhaps someone else would have got the job.

We’ve come to the end of this long interview, but before we go our separate ways, it’s time for the dreaded question: What game would you recommend if you could name just one? It’s a very complex question for Freddi, the jack-of-all-trades and demanding man that he is. Few games are good enough for him. If there’s one style he doesn’t play, it’s sports games. He’s a fan of the NFL (Go ravens, he says), but Madden has fallen out of his hands. Video games are a medium, just like music or film, that evoke a wide range of emotions. Whether you like a title or not depends on the mood you’re in. Even so, he considers certain games such as Fallout, Fallout 2, The Elder Scroll II: Daggerfall and Baldur’s Gate 3 to be legends, but it’s his role-playing side that speaks for itself. He appreciates the freedom offered by some CRPGs. In another style, he talks about the first two Tomb Raiders, which were his first Third Person Shooters and therefore hold a special place in his heart as a gamer. Then there’s Wreckfest, the roll’s of stock-car games that bring back memories of childhood sessions on Destruction Derby, which he bled dry. Freddi is more the type to build a pantheon of masterpieces in his genre than to name one above all others. As we speak, not far from Halloween, he’s rediscovering Alien Isolation, which he hadn’t had a chance to finish when it was released. The game has held up well over the years, and the mechanics and sound design are incredible. The list could go on and on, because Freddi started playing games at a very young age, with his family, on the Amstrad. His first real gaming experience, with games he chose himself, was on Playstation. He soon became a committed PC gamer, making his mark on Half Life. So we’re dealing with a gamer who loves diversity and discovering nuggets.

That concludes this interview. I hope you found it as interesting as I did. If you did, please feel free to share it. As I said in my introduction, the Game’n Breakfast formula is going to change. Don’t worry, next month we’ll be meeting as usual on the last Sunday of the month. February this year is Speedons, Mister MV’s charity event. It’s a good time to start diversifying the guest list, as we’ll be welcoming Kemist, a souls-like speedrunner and the emblematic figure of this weekend dedicated to speed. If you want to find out more about how we make no-hitters on Elden Ring, this is the place. This will also be the last episode of GnB, following the rhythm of one issue per month. The idea is to reserve it for unusual profiles and to free up my time to offer different formats for Point’n Think écrit and podcast, so stay tuned. I’d also like to take this opportunity to remind you that our patreon has had a facelift and that, for the time being, the aim is to offer you content from non-French-speaking professionals with the help of an interpreter in real time. I look forward to seeing you soon…

Play well, play fun, play indie!

Inksushi