Inside the Future of the Video Game Industry with Chris Hewish, Chief Strategy & Comms Officer at Xsolla

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're talking to Chris Hewish, Chief Strategy and Communications Officer at Xsolla, about the future of the video game industry and how Chris shapes his leadership strategy as a gamer. Thanks to Xsolla for sponsoring this episode. To learn more about the future of the video game industry, go to xsolla.com. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:29) How are you doing today, Chris?

(Chris Hewish at 00:00:31) I'm doing great. Thank you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:33) So I want to start at the top about what Xsolla is. Am I saying it right, and what is it?

(Chris Hewish at 00:00:37) Yes, you are saying it right. So Xsolla is basically a video game commerce company. So think of us as an e-commerce company that focuses only on the video game industry, and we provide everything that anybody making a video game would need to be able to go direct to consumer with that game, to be able to sell it, to be able to reward their players, build their audience, whatever it might be, create their own platform. So we've been in business for about 20 years now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:10) So they make the game, and then you make all these tools that allow them to connect with the customer.

(Chris Hewish at 00:01:15) Exactly. So that they can do their payments or their player identity or their subscriptions, or their rewards for the players, their websites, their in-game stores, whatever it might be. And we work with companies of all sizes from the biggest out there, like Epic and Roblox and NetEase and a whole host of others, all the way down to individual developers who just have their singular vision and they want to bring it out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:43) Awesome. Why this? You were at Activision, DreamWorks. Is this the future? Like, why would you make this career change?

(Chris Hewish at 00:01:49) Yeah, so it definitely was a bit of a career shift, going from being on that content creation side for my entire career and having a lot of success there. And then it came to a point where I thought I had done everything there was to do in the industry, worked on all sides of the business. And that's kind of a passion, sort of my own journey, right, where I really love to learn, and I've wanted to understand all sides of the game business from making games and publishing them and marketing them and running studios and all of that.

(Chris Hewish at 00:02:21) And then I met the people over here at Xsolla and really realized that there was a whole side of the business, which was more business-to-business oriented, that I had never even considered. And for me, it was a chance to really get in and actually work with the industry at scale. So previously, I had worked on, I had had publishing slates of maybe eight to 10 games a year. And here, I get to work with thousands of games every year, all across the world, every genre, all sizes, and learn really a lot about the behind-the-scenes piece of operating a games business and going direct to consumer. So that was really interesting for me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:03) So all these games, you're around them all the time. Which ones do you play?

(Chris Hewish at 00:03:08) So I am an avid player of a game called Apex Legends, and I play that pretty much every single day and have since it launched. I certainly play a lot of other games and a lot of games that our partners make, but this is my go-to game.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:25) What type of game is it?

(Chris Hewish at 00:03:26) It is a competitive first-person shooter, team-based. So you and two other players form a team of three people, and there are 20 teams in any given match, and each team is competing to be the last team standing. So it's what people call a battle royale. Super competitive, super fast. Love it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:49) Yeah. I'm a Call of Duty person back before I had kids, and they took my time away from me. But yeah, it sounds like three versus three battle royale type situation.

(Chris Hewish at 00:04:01) Absolutely. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:03) All right. Because that's your game. That's where you log in hours.

(Chris Hewish at 00:04:05) That is where I log hours. And I too have kids, so I am kind of burning the candle at both ends when it comes to continuing my game playing and life. But it, I can quasi-justify it in the sense that I work with game studios and game developers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:23) You've got to know what's going on.

(Chris Hewish at 00:04:25) Got to know what's going on.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:26) The latest expansion pack? Come on.

(Chris Hewish at 00:04:28) Exactly. I'm working on it. Get some credibility for being platinum ranked and all that kind of stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:34) There we go. So how old are your kids? What's the age ranges?

(Chris Hewish at 00:04:38) Twelve and ten. Twelve and ten.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:41) So you're just starting to become uncool?

(Chris Hewish at 00:04:43) Exactly. Exactly. In fact, I just asked ChatGPT yesterday, okay, I didn't say how do I stay cool, but it was like, okay, how do I stay connected with my kids as they're starting to become their own people, which is what we all want. But yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:00) It's like they're little language models that we've trained up, and then they start teaching us stuff, and then they don't need us anymore.

(Chris Hewish at 00:05:06) Exactly. And yourself?

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:09) Ages seven, five, and two. One girl, two boys. Yep.

(Chris Hewish at 00:05:12) Nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:13) So we're still cool. I'm still cool. Daddy's still awesome. But you can see in my seven-year-old daughter, I can see little hints of what's to come by ten, twelve, fourteen. Yeah.

(Chris Hewish at 00:05:24) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:25) Okay. So, hey, personal interest of mine. I was a huge fan of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater. Played it a lot. And I noticed you were at Activision when that game was released. Did you have any part of that game?

(Chris Hewish at 00:05:40) So I was involved, but not, was not driving that game. But I certainly did get a chance to be involved, give some creative input, do some testing, produced some of the ports of the game to other platforms. Fantastic game. But it was really a great team at Neversoft that was creating that and driving it the whole time. And such, it was such a good team effort, and really everybody leaned into being authentic and not just, by authentic, by working with Tony Hawk, but really the lifestyle and everything. So it was amazing to be part of and to be around and was such a fun game. Played so much of that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:22) Nice. In my notes, I'll just put down lead developer.

(Chris Hewish at 00:06:26) Yeah. There's probably a thousand people out there that would claim to be lead developer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:32) I know. I know. I heard an interview with Tony Hawk, him talking about how that whole thing came to fruition, and he just was pretty relaxed about it, and it just kind of happened for him.

(Chris Hewish at 00:06:44) Yeah. It really did. And I know in some of his interviews, he talks about how that was Activision is what got him his first house type of thing through the royalties on the game. And he was an amazing partner to work with as well, which is part of a key to something like that being successful. You know, it's not just getting his likeness and his name, but he was really involved and not only promoted the game, but really worked with the team to help them get everything sort of right and accurate and was a real co-creator on that game. And to the team's credit, they fully accepted that and lived the lifestyle, and there was a real good match there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:25) Yeah. He's got a good public persona. Him and I'd put him in the same category as like a Keanu Reeves, where they just look like normal people who happen to have success versus somebody trying to play the role of a successful person.

(Chris Hewish at 00:07:37) Exactly. Yeah, 100%.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:39) All right. So Apex Legends, I would like to see if we can make a leap here and connect what you've learned in video games running teams versus leadership. Is that connection there?

(Chris Hewish at 00:07:51) Yeah. Absolutely. You know, I think coming back to the game there, to Apex, one of the corollaries, this is a game where, you really, I think a couple of things that you have to learn, for me, I play as a solo queue player, so I get teamed up with random teammates. And that means that there's always a different type of play style that I'm encountering. And in order to succeed as a team, you kind of have to get your play styles aligned and in sync. Otherwise, you're going to have one person who's very aggressive out in front, getting off on their own into situations and somebody standing back, not supporting, and everything falls apart. And I think the thing that really ties that over to leadership in general and even working with game teams is the idea that you're going to have all these different styles on your team. And it's really important to communicate and get those styles aligned. And as a leader, that communication really falls on you. You can't expect that the person who's, again, using the game analogy, getting out there and being hyper-aggressive is going to communicate that that's their style and that the person who wants to be more supportive is going to communicate it. You need to really be that conduit who can facilitate communication between them, kind of make sure that people are aware of what one another are doing and try to bring some cohesion to that and then leverage those styles a little bit favorably for you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:25) Can you give me a practical, like, how that actually works in gameplay? We'll start with gameplay first.

(Chris Hewish at 00:09:30) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:30) You load into the game. I'm just going to use that phrase. And then what do you, instantly just start talking with the team about, like, what their styles are and inquiring?

(Chris Hewish at 00:09:38) Yeah. Actually, exactly that. So often what I'll do when I load in, well, one of the first things is we just check, does everybody have a mic? Right? Are people even, and this is a great core just as a great basis for communication. Are you able to actually communicate? Right? Are we, you know, having a mic is different than in real-life communication, but there's a parallel there of, if somebody does not have a microphone, they can only communicate through chat in the game, and that's going to slow things down a little bit. And you should think about that. Right? And realize that they may not be able to type while they're running and gunning at the same time. So, that impacts just the tempo of communication. But yeah. So the first thing is, do we all have mics? If not, okay, then understand who does, who doesn't. And then what's your play style? Like, do you like to go aggressive? Do you like to play it slower? Do you want to hot drop and drop in with a lot of other teams right away, or do you want to take it a little easier? What kind of loadout do you like? You know, if I'm going to be going out and looting, what can I keep an eye out for that you may want? Right? So that I'm not either missing stuff and ignoring it, or I'm not just being greedy and taking all of it myself.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:57) That's good. That's a good answer. All right. So you check on the player styles. I can see all that mapping to running a team, like, understanding the strengths of your team members and figuring out who needs what and just taking that initiative and asking those questions.

(Chris Hewish at 00:11:14) Yeah. Absolutely. And I think even out of the gate, I think a lot of people understand conceptually communication, being able to identify different, and I'm not saying you need a Briggs-Meyers everybody and understand all of their deeper motivations. But generally understanding how people like to work and being able to balance that, but even going a little deeper, and this is where it gets really powerful. You know, that example, and it's not a direct analogy, but the example of, do you have a microphone or not, or do you have to use a keyboard? Do your team all have the same basic understanding of communication and what it means, right? Where you may think, oh, I'm going to be a great facilitator of communication for my team, but do you actually understand what that means to each person? Right? There are some people who, to them, a good leader who's communicating is getting really detailed, right? And getting into the weeds even and giving them all of this information and direction. But for the person sitting next to them, they may view if you try to do that same form of communication to them, they're going to be like, oh my gosh, you're micromanaging me, this is horrible, this is a horrible leader. They may just want the highlights, right? And they're good with that and they'll come to you if they need more. So if you don't understand that out of the gate and respect that, you may be really good in communicating to one part of your team, but that is going to be actually poor communication to the rest of your team, if that makes sense.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:49) That totally makes sense. Yeah. Now for you, what's your preference? Communication preference.

(Chris Hewish at 00:12:55) Yeah. For me, you know, I tend to be more of the, show me the flag on the hill, and then I'll figure out how to get there. Right? So give me some good direction. Give me the context. So I'm actually a context guy. You know, I want to know what our goal is, and I want to know why we should be achieving that goal. And then I can fill in the rest from there. Right? The how do we achieve it? What's required to succeed, all of that. So for me, it's really just understanding the goal and having context around why we want to achieve it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:33) Yeah. I learned this, I don't know, six or seven years ago. I did an interview with Yasser Anwar, I believe is how I say his name. And he was the CTO over at Williams-Sonoma. And he told me when I was talking with him, asking him questions, he came up with this phrase like, outcome-driven. And that stuck with, that's one of those weird little things that have just stuck with me over the years because I figured out, before that conversation with him, I'd tell you, like, oh, I'm good at all the things. And then what I really am good at is you giving me an outcome and just the outcome and me achieving it. And then if I have questions about constraints along the way, like money and things like that, I'll ask, timeline, money, things like that. But I enjoy this idea of grabbing an outcome and then just going off and just getting it done.

(Chris Hewish at 00:14:19) I really like that. I'm actually going to borrow that and get that into my vernacular here. I love that, outcome-driven, and I think that's really powerful.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:32) Because everybody wants you to be good at something. And the thing is, it's really hard to articulate that when that's your thing. Right? It's like, it doesn't really matter what I'm doing. You could tell me to go build a swim team. It's like, okay, we can do that.

(Chris Hewish at 00:14:49) Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:50) Okay. So quick and tough decisions. Right? You've got to make quick and tough decisions when you're playing the games. Has that helped at all in leadership?

(Chris Hewish at 00:14:59) Yeah. It really has. You know, I think, again, playing the games, you really need to know when to press your advantage or fall back or adjust. And often, you'll see in a game, it's like, okay. Oh my gosh.

(Chris Hewish at 00:15:13) We've cracked the armor on one of the guys on the other team, knocked another. It's time to rush, right, and go in and press that advantage. But if your team isn't in sync and you kind of take too long to do that and you go in a little bit later, you know, if the time between when you've decided to push is delayed and then you go in a bit later, the other team may have revived and now you're out in the open and you get wiped out, right? So I've seen that really apply to business where, you know, too often you take all of this time to make the right decision. It's like we've got the perfect decision or an optimal position or our idea of what to do, but then we wait to do it.

(Chris Hewish at 00:15:53) And by the time we actually implement it, the environment has changed. And that optimal action is no longer optimal because it was good for what the environment was, you know, prior, like a few days before, a few weeks before. But the environment has changed, and now that action is no longer optimal and can actually lead to, you know, inefficiencies or even failure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:18) Now is my favorite time of day.

(Chris Hewish at 00:16:21) Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:21) That's the type of person I am. My wife calls it impatient, but I just like to do things. I like to do things.

(Chris Hewish at 00:16:28) Yeah, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:29) It's actually one of the biggest reasons why I didn't do well or wasn't attracted to, like, being an employee because I found it so, like—I know there's companies that have cultures where they empower people, but my first two small experiences as an employee were just so constrictive that I was like, I cannot do this. I don't enjoy how I spend my time. I need to go get things done, you know, not make it look like I'm getting things done. I need to actually get things done.

(Chris Hewish at 00:16:57) Exactly, exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:59) So you're Interim CEO currently. Is that correct?

(Chris Hewish at 00:17:03) No, I actually am now Chief Strategy and Communications Officer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:08) Okay.

(Chris Hewish at 00:17:09) That role has shifted a little bit over the past year.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:12) Oh, very cool. So do you have a CEO now?

(Chris Hewish at 00:17:15) Our founder is sort of taking on that role.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:19) Yep. Nice. What's their name?

(Chris Hewish at 00:17:20) Alexander Agapitov, also known as Shurick Agapitov.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:26) Shurick. Very cool. And so now main driver of the vision, and then you're helping support that.

(Chris Hewish at 00:17:34) That's correct.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:34) Yep. Nice. Yeah, yeah. That's what a lot of tech CTOs are doing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:40) That's a lot of—yeah. So what's the leadership style that you've experienced someone else do that's really stuck with you?

(Chris Hewish at 00:17:47) So I've had, fortunately, a lot of good experiences over the years with some incredible leaders, names everybody would recognize. But one of the ones that really stood out to me was during my time at DreamWorks Animation with Jeffrey Katzenberg. And there was a—and it's really interesting. The details, even of what the project was and everything, kind of have faded away a little bit. But the scenario, the situation and the leadership lesson really has stuck with me. So there was a high-profile project that the company had been working on, very expensive project, getting into a whole new sort of line of business, and it did not work out.

(Chris Hewish at 00:18:27) And, you know, you could say it was a failure. And it cost the company a fair amount of resources. And I remember at a company meeting, Jeffrey kind of announced shutting down this initiative. And he actually had sort of one of the leaders behind that initiative up on stage. And he said, "Look, you know, I don't view this as a failure.

(Chris Hewish at 00:18:52) No one in the company should view this as a failure. I view this, you know, as, um, while not a success, you know, it's not something to be punished for." And, you know, "We really want an environment"—and this is how I recall it. I'm paraphrasing. But "We really want a culture where people are rewarded for taking risks and for trying new things.

(Chris Hewish at 00:19:14) And I want to tell everybody, you know, right now, right here and now, you know, there's no punishment. There's no, you know—this is not a failure for this person. They're right up here with me, right? They're not being put, you know, off into the corner somewhere." Again, these are my words. And, you know, he said, "I really value a culture where people are trying hard things and working really hard, giving it their all.

(Chris Hewish at 00:19:41) And if you're doing that, then it's not a failure, right? You haven't failed. It's just something that didn't work. Most things don't work.

(Chris Hewish at 00:19:48) Right?" And so he kept that person on, put them on to a new project. And lo and behold, that new project ended up being one of the biggest ongoing franchises that the company has. And, you know, it was a real lesson to me where he had a very talented team and individual, or individuals. And in many companies, they would have just been fired.

(Chris Hewish at 00:20:10) "Oh, you failed. This project is a disaster. I'm the CEO. I'm looking for someone to blame. I'm gonna blame you."

(Chris Hewish at 00:20:16) Right? But no, he took that on himself and he said, "You all are incredibly talented. You worked incredibly hard. You know, we're gonna have you do something else." And the end result was a net positive for the company in the long term.

(Chris Hewish at 00:20:29) And that was a real lesson that stuck with me of, you know, don't punish failure. You know, kind of celebrate failure and make sure that people know that they're safe as long as they're working hard and giving a good effort, right, and they weren't negligent about the whole thing. And of course, then that's a different type of failure. But if someone's talented and they're working hard and they're keeping in sync with what the leadership's vision is, and it doesn't work out, you know, don't punish them for that. And, you know, this really led to one of the concepts I love about company culture—you often hear people say companies are either in a survive or a thrive mode, the employees.

(Chris Hewish at 00:21:10) And you really want your employees to be in an environment where they feel they can thrive, not that they just have to survive. And that's what he did. He really taught and he showed it to the whole company. He got up there and he talked the talk, walked the walk, and it was a real important lesson for me on just keeping talented people motivated, feeling secure, willing to take another risk, knowing that they were gonna continue to thrive even if that didn't work out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:36) He sounds like a good leader. What was his name?

(Chris Hewish at 00:21:38) That was Jeffrey Katzenberg, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:41) Okay. Yeah. Way to go, Jeffrey, because it's like showering. You have to do it every day. You have to continuously—you could tell people things, but then you have to just continuously remind them of, like, you do have permission to do this. Because at the end of the day, I mean, it's science. Like, when you run an experiment, you try ten things, one or two are gonna work a little bit better than the others. You get rid of the ones that didn't work, but you're not sitting there on one of the didn't-work ones, like, obsessing over it. You're like, this is just the process we go through to achieve greatness.

(Chris Hewish at 00:22:11) That's right. And that's a great analogy comparing it to science and experiments. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:17) I was surprised to learn how Microsoft Unified Support works. Apparently, Microsoft decides your support fee based on the amount of software that you buy instead of billing you for the actual support hours that you use. This means that you pay for support that you might never use. The pay-as-you-go model is a much better model, but Microsoft doesn't offer that. I did find a company that does offer this, and they're called US Cloud, and fifty of the Fortune 500 use them. Not only is it better, faster support with all US-based engineers, it's also cheaper. 94% of US Cloud clients report saving a third or more when switching from Microsoft Unified Support to US Cloud. Now you'll just have to figure out what to do with all of that extra money. If it were me, I'm responsible, so I'd reallocate that money to improve my team.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:02) What would you do, Josh?

(Intro Narrator at 00:23:04) I think I'd just try and buy a ticket to space.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:07) All right. Astronaut Josh. For out-of-this-world savings, visit uscloud.com to book a call and find out how much your team can save. So how do you navigate the tension between creative vision and business realities?

(Chris Hewish at 00:23:23) Yeah. So, you know, I think navigating that tension is—it can be tough, right? Because teams that are creative often are not really thinking about the business and vice versa. You know, your business teams aren't really often thinking about creative, and nor should either. They've got their own priorities, their own focus. But they are part of an ecosystem. And, you know, you see this at places like even at Activision and other game companies where, you know, having to—as the industry evolves, teams, creative teams and business teams, have had to evolve what they're making and how it actually is selling and how that business is running with players, or the industry. And I think the way—one of the ways to do that is, of course, communication across the teams, you know, making sure that everybody understands what the objectives are, that we're all in it together. But beyond that, it's making sure that the teams stay passionate about what they're working on, that they can continue to innovate, but understand the context, the broader context of what they're, you know, innovating within.

(Chris Hewish at 00:24:35) So it's a delicate balance, and, you know, you have to really lean into, I think, what I like to call structured creativity. It's not me—I mean, that's a thing. But, you know, structured creativity where the creative teams can feel safe and they—but at the same time, they have a focused kind of environment that they're working within, and they understand the business objectives so that they can work towards those. I think one of the biggest tools that I developed over the years was—I think a lot of business-oriented people make a mistake where they go to a creative team and they try to tell them what to do to achieve the business outcome.

(Chris Hewish at 00:25:16) And then you're gonna get resistance because the creative team is like, "Look, we're creative here. We don't care about business," and the walls go up. But what I found really successful is if you can go to the creative teams and say, "Hey, look. Here's our business objectives. Here's our goals. You're the creative team. You know, figure out how you can do something amazing while achieving these goals." And nine times out of ten, you're gonna get support for the team, some buy-in on that, to make sure that they're able to still stay passionate but create something that works for you. And then on the flip side, it's making sure that the business teams respect the creative. You know, I think often companies get in trouble where the business side doesn't respect the creative, and they think of it too much as a business of just, you know, a spreadsheet, and they don't really respect what goes into making it work.

(Chris Hewish at 00:26:09) And, you know, being adaptable from a business side to, you know, be able to work with what the creative team is bringing to you and give them the guidance that they need without being sort of directive or telling them exactly what to do. So it's not about choosing necessarily between creativity and business, but building connective tissue between them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:34) Yeah, yeah. I have this internal rank of, like, maturity for business because of doing, you know, a thousand of these interviews. And the people at the very top, they understand the spreadsheets, but they also understand that spreadsheets aren't everything. Like, you can find people that have made tens or hundreds of millions of dollars that are just spreadsheet-driven and they're just like, "That's it. This stuff doesn't matter. It's lame." But then the people who are at, like, the very, very, very top, they understand what you just explained. You know, they understand that you have to work with the creative people and get that going.

(Chris Hewish at 00:27:06) So—yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's, you know, it's—what is the adage of bringing somebody in to help solve a problem with you versus telling them what to do to solve the problem, right? Make them part of the solution.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:19) It works great with LLMs, but not with people.

(Chris Hewish at 00:27:22) And not with people. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:25) Yeah, yeah. Oh, man. I learned that lesson the hard way with my wife. So I was, like, software engineer for over ten years and just constantly churning out software and leading a team, but it was a—it was, like, you know, remote teams. So it wasn't, like, interpersonal—too many interpersonal skills at the time. And I would sit there and program the whole day and then I'd get off the computer and I'd interact with my girlfriend in real life—and she's now my wife and we have the kids—but I realized really quickly that you can't talk to your wife like you talk to the computer.

(Chris Hewish at 00:27:58) Oh my God. It's so funny you say that because my wife will—she often says to me, like, "Don't business-speak me, Chris. Don't you do it. Don't try to manage me like one of your teams." Like, "Okay, okay, okay."

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:16) How do you feel about what happened, Chris? You get a little feedback sandwich for your wife. "You did this real great, honey."

(Chris Hewish at 00:28:26) Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:27) "With the Amazon purchases. Too many boxes."

(Chris Hewish at 00:28:30) "But—"

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:31) "You got them on sale, so—"

(Chris Hewish at 00:28:32) Right. "Oh, I love that one. I said, we actually saved money. They were on sale."

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:37) "We save money."

(Chris Hewish at 00:28:38) Yeah. That math doesn't work. It's still an expense.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:41) Throw that by Dave Ramsey. See how that goes. He'll say the things you don't buy are always 100% on sale.

(Chris Hewish at 00:28:49) That's right. I love that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:52) Let's talk about GDC 2025. That's the Game Developers Conference. Now is that for everybody, or is that something Xsolla puts on?

(Chris Hewish at 00:28:59) No, that is for everybody. We—Xsolla is a sponsor of the Game Developers Conference, but GDC is actually run by its own organization. It's been going on for several decades now, at least.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:13) Oh, very cool. So how was 2025?

(Chris Hewish at 00:29:16) It was good. You know, it was—so this is a gathering of game developers that come around, come in from all over the world. There were about 30,000 developers that come in, and the conference really has sort of two parts to it. There's a whole business-to-business side where a lot of networking and deal-making and all of that stuff goes on. And then there's a whole developer side, sort of a B2C or C2C, I guess, creator-to-creator side, where you have all these sessions where developers are sharing best practices and learnings and case studies.

(Chris Hewish at 00:29:51) So it's a really cool mix of both the creative and the business, as we were just talking about, in one place. It takes place in San Francisco and lasts for the week, and it was pretty energized. You know, it's always great to get out there and meet with the industry, hear what's going on, you know, what people are focused on and talking about. And, you know, for me, at least, my part in it, there was a lot of discussion around the accelerating convergence of AI and game development workflows. You know, what—and you've mentioned LLMs, right, you know, throughout the podcast here.

(Chris Hewish at 00:30:29) But really, what is coming for AI, and how will that evolve into helping game development? So, you know, that was really interesting to dive into that. And, you know, it was things like procedural content generation. And as an engineer, you know that we've done that for years with algorithms, which some would argue are an early form of AI. But how can AI take a lot of this procedural content generation to the next level to create real-time behavior with non-player characters that doesn't have to be scripted?

(Chris Hewish at 00:31:04) You know, how can it really adapt to your play style and have a game that adjusts and adapts to you with not only the environment and the non-player characters, but even the game mechanics, and then even going into the commerce? You know, how does it adapt to things that you might find valuable to create a better value proposition for you, which, you know, is a win-win for everybody.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:28) There's nothing holding us back from that. All the technology exists today. We're just waiting for it to be implemented.

(Chris Hewish at 00:31:33) Well, that's exactly it. I think, look, I think there's a natural evolution of technology when new technology is created. There then are some stages of how it's sort of embraced or, you know, folded into workflows—not just workflows, but consumer expectation, consumer behavior. And I think we're still, to your point, the tech is all there. We're just still in that early stage of, okay, how do we actually go from—and some of it just takes time.

(Chris Hewish at 00:32:02) You know, how do you take these AI tools or agents that other people have built that are off the shelf? And how do you start to adapt those to work with your existing tool sets or your own material or your own content internally, and actually start to create your own custom tools, you know, from this, that then get you further down that adoption chain?

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:24) It's all happening so fast. Have you seen on X those people making—they'll use an LLM to make a game and grow it to like $50,000 a month of revenue in like two weeks? It's crazy.

(Chris Hewish at 00:32:37) It is crazy. And then the whole, what is it? Vibe coding, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:41) Yeah, yeah. But and then now the marketers grabbed it. Now they're like, "vibe marketing." And I'm like, okay, guys. Of course you would steal it. You're the buzzword thief of the world.

(Chris Hewish at 00:32:52) Of course. Hey, before you know it, people are gonna get funded for having a Vibe studio, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:59) Oh, there it is. You know what? I'm actually feeling, Chris, this might be a Vibe podcast right now.

(Chris Hewish at 00:33:04) I love it. You know, and then we come all the way back around to Keanu Reeves, who is, you know, arguably the vibe of all, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:14) He's like the queen bee. He is the vibe. Oh my goodness. Alright, so AI is gonna have a huge impact. People are just gobbling it up and integrating it into their workflows and their tech when it comes to game development. What's the coolest thing, subjectively, personally, that you've seen AI do in the gaming world?

(Chris Hewish at 00:33:37) Oh man. You know, look, I think subjectively, the coolest thing—and because it could potentially solve a pain point for me as a player—is just the AI that can ride shotgun and be a coach in real time as you're playing, right? You know, I think that could be amazing.

(Chris Hewish at 00:33:58) And to take that even further, like, to come back to, you know, what we talked about with Apex Legends—you know, I'm playing with a team of two other people. We're all random. We don't know one another. How awesome would it be if we each had AI coaches that were helping that communication, right, and helping to adjust and, you know, kind of allow us to work together a little bit better, but then also individually help us with improving our own skills.

(Chris Hewish at 00:34:23) You know, for me, game sense is where I shine. You know, I'm really good with game sense. My aim—you know, I'm a dad, I'm a little bit older. My twitch skills are not the best, so I'm a little bit mid when it comes to aim. So it would be great if I could get a little bit of help, you know, on that front and have an AI coach that was helping me in real time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:44) Yeah, forget the coach for that. Just auto lock.

(Chris Hewish at 00:34:46) Yeah, I realized as I said that I'm like, "Yeah, duh, Chris. There's something called aimbot that can do that for you," but that's not what I'm talking about.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:55) Just ask the coach, "Can you make me twenty years younger? Can you get my reflexes faster?"

(Chris Hewish at 00:35:00) Exactly. Well, but it could be things like, "Hey, you know, Chris, ease up on your rate of fire with this weapon, right? Because the recoil pattern, if you—you know, is too hard," or, "You know, remember to reload before you run out because it'll be a faster reload," and, you know, just things like that, right? That could be really helpful.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:17) Yeah. No, it reminds me of—I think her name was Cortana in Halo—that would walk around and always help you. I don't remember the exact name of the bot, but that's been around in video games for a while. It's just evolved, and it's gotten so much more intelligent.

(Chris Hewish at 00:35:31) To get intelligent, to have memory, right? To be able to adapt situationally, you know, that's where—

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:38) Cross-game to cross-game sessions too.

(Chris Hewish at 00:35:40) Oh my gosh, exactly. So cool. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:43) Have you used the Grok voice yet?

(Chris Hewish at 00:35:46) I have not.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:47) Oh, it's good. It's good. They're not—it's not persisting across conversations, and it can't go out into the Internet yet. The voice version can't. The text version can.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:58) But it is scary. These past two years have been so fun for me, from seeing GPT get popular and into normal people culture—like, for my grandma to know about it—and to where it's come in the past two years today. It is just—and it's so fast. It's moving so fast.

(Chris Hewish at 00:36:19) It really is. I mean, look, just personally, even on the GPT side, you know, I'm not a programmer, right? So I can work with prompts, and I've had fun where I've created my own Chris Hewish GPT, and I've trained it. I went back and gathered up all the interviews I've done, all of my writing, you know, both public and private, my own ideas. Just anything I had that was a piece of me, right, creatively or even business-wise. And I trained it up just on that to create a version of myself that I now use as a really effective sort of partner to help with writing, you know, being able to increase my productivity output on things that I'm writing, to be able to give me—distill even like, what is your leadership style? Just all of these different things.

(Chris Hewish at 00:37:08) And it's a lot of fun, and it was surprisingly easy to do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:14) Yeah, it is. One of my favorite ones to do along those lines—and by the way, we have built a custom app where we filtered it through all my interviews, and so we trained it on all the transcriptions from all my interviews. But, yeah, one of my favorite things to do other than that, using that GPT that we made, is to use the GPT in a sense where, like, if I wanted to grab like five different marketing books, you know, like Seth Godin and some other people. Grab these five books that I've already read—presume, like, this is how I actually did use it. I took five marketing books that I had read that I thought were really good, and then I trained it on that. And then I said, "Hey, act like, you know, a collection of all of these books." And then I bounced ideas.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:04) So I had this marketing GPT that I would bounce ideas off of, but I knew what its underlying principles were. And I told it not to use, like, other principles that it knows from other books. I'm like, "Just use these books and just use the principles in here." And that was incredibly beneficial for me.

(Chris Hewish at 00:38:20) Oh, I love that. I love that, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:23) Yeah, so if you have like a leadership issue, you can be like, whoever your favorite leadership people are, John Maxwell or whoever it might be, you could say, "Hey, how would John Maxwell handle this situation based exclusively on what they've written in their books?"

(Chris Hewish at 00:38:36) Gosh, you know, you're giving me some ideas here. Like, you know, one of the—and I know we're kind of going off here a little bit, but, you know, one of the common challenges for companies is onboarding, right? How do you onboard somebody into your company? Not just the processes, but the actual company culture, right? And what are the beliefs? You know, what is the culture of the company?

(Chris Hewish at 00:38:57) So it would be really cool to do exactly what you said with that leadership idea. Like, because a lot of companies base their approach on a couple of different books, right? Whatever that might be, and train up a GPT that could be part of somebody's onboarding where they could just sit there and ask it questions about the company and how the company approaches different problems and, you know, what's the style, how do things get done, which often falls on another person, right, who has to take time out of their day to help onboard somebody. So I think that's just—could be an amazing use case.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:36) Yeah, yeah. Let's talk about Xsolla, like the value prop, and because we've got about, you know, eight, ten minutes left here, and I really wanna make sure everybody understands, like, where are the friction points that Xsolla removes that makes your life easier?

(Chris Hewish at 00:39:49) Yeah, so really the friction points that we look to solve are removing any barrier to you connecting with as many players as you can around the world to basically run the—to run commerce for your game, but also keep those players engaged and rewarded for being part of your game or your game community. And what do I mean by that? So, you know, everybody currently goes through third-party—not everybody, but a lot of people go through third-party platforms to, like, the App Store to sell their game, right, to get it downloaded. And then when players buy something, they'll use that, you know, they'll charge it within the app through Apple. And, you know, that's really—there's low friction there because people are already integrated into that ecosystem, but that's only for people in that ecosystem.

(Chris Hewish at 00:40:43) There are many, many players around the world that actually are not part of these ecosystems with third-party platforms because they're using alternative payments, or, you know, their options to transact aren't available on the platform. So that's one area we really look to solve. We have over a thousand payment methods integrated into our API now, so anybody anywhere can—you know, if they play your game and they're a fan, they can buy things in your game if you're working with us. But that's all on the payments and the commerce side.

(Chris Hewish at 00:41:16) And the other part of that is just being able to really keep your players engaged and make that rewarding for them. So that's a whole new area that we've ventured into. But yeah, there's a ton, and, you know, it comes to everything. Removing friction across the entire publishing journey is probably a succinct way of saying it. So making distribution easier, payments easier, marketing, and even now cloud, you know, allowing players anywhere to be able to interact with any game and really taking all of that off of the developer so that they can focus just on making great games. And, you know, if a developer or a game maker wants to go direct to customer, they also have to worry about things like taxes and compliance and chargebacks and all of that.

(Chris Hewish at 00:42:08) So we handle all of that for them as well, and they just have to make a game and make it great for their players, and we'll handle the rest for them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:18) Oh, nice. And they just—you have SDKs and they integrate with you and everything like that.

(Chris Hewish at 00:42:22) Yep, exactly. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:25) That's so cool. What's the cloud gaming? Is that becoming a thing?

(Chris Hewish at 00:42:30) You know, it is. So, look, there's probably plenty of people in the audience, especially in the game development or the game community, who hear cloud gaming, and there's some eye-rolling going on, right? But the truth of the matter is that cloud is here. It's only growing. And initially, when cloud first was introduced to the industry, it was really sold—we had Google Stadia, for instance. It was really sold as like, "Hey, this is a new platform. It's a whole—it's just like a console or a PC or a mobile platform. It's a whole new platform." But the reality is cloud is really more of a feature, right, that can work with other platforms.

(Chris Hewish at 00:43:11) And it reduces certain pain points in regards to allowing people from anywhere to be able to connect with your game. So if you've made a game, a HD game, high-definition game that runs really well in a high-end gaming system, you know, there's a lot of people that don't have high-end gaming systems that normally would not be able to play your game. But if you do a cloud integration, now anybody with a browser can actually go and play your game through the cloud. So that now has really removed all the barriers on the accessibility side. And then the second part of that was the business model.

(Chris Hewish at 00:43:49) You know, cloud has a lot of—there's fees on the back end, right? It's a little bit more expensive on the server side to operate a cloud game. And when initially it came out, people were trying to use existing business models of like, "Oh, free-to-play or premium," but those really didn't work out because your cloud fees just, you know, were too expensive, especially at scale. So what we've really looked at is that there's two different good business models for cloud.

(Chris Hewish at 00:44:19) One is use it as part of just being able to test your game and market your game, and it's kind of a development and marketing expense. But the second part, as a commercial side, is a pay-as-you-play model. And really, you know, people can get in, play a cloud game, and they're paying as they play, kind of like the coin-op model where you're putting a quarter in the machine, right, to keep on playing and getting certain amounts of time to play, or the cyber cafe, cyber PC, you know, kind of model. And that covers those costs that come from operating a cloud game while giving a sort of a predictable and profitable business model. So, you know, we see this as really where cloud gaming is. The use cases have been clearly identified now. The costs, the business model have been identified, and now it's starting to really gain momentum even beyond, you know, what Xbox and Nvidia are doing with just their cloud services. But really for developers to be able to use it on their own. And with us, we have a whole publishing suite where cloud is part of that. So you can build your own publishing platform and have cloud-delivered games as part of it. They could be demos, right, that then encourage people to buy the full game or download the full game, or even this pay-as-you-play model that lets people who, you know, maybe don't have $60 to buy a game or aren't gonna spend a lot of money on a free-to-play game can actually get in and play and pay as they go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:50) Yeah. It's been interesting to see my kids' game on their iPads where the ads will be another game that they can play.

(Chris Hewish at 00:45:58) Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:59) It's like, what is that? That's crazy. The future is definitely here.

(Chris Hewish at 00:46:05) Yeah. I mean, it really is. And that whole model of ads that are another game you can play, you know, that even cloud can get in there now where you could have, you know, an ad that has a cloud integration to be able to play, you know, an actual real game, not just some, you know, hyper-casual thing that's built to be an acquisition tool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:26) Gaming's coming at us everywhere. Have you seen Netflix release games? Even LinkedIn had games.

(Chris Huish at 00:46:32) Yeah. I mean, it really is ubiquitous. Netflix has taken a lot of shots on goal. They just announced a big MMO, multiplayer online game as their next big thing coming. And, gosh, yeah, LinkedIn and Snap and, you know, take your pick.

(Chris Huish at 00:46:54) And you also now have a lot of established media companies and telcos that are doing their own game portals to help drive engagement and increase the value proposition.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:05) Telcos are doing game portals?

(Chris Huish at 00:47:07) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:07) Do you have an example of that?

(Chris Huish at 00:47:09) Oh, gosh. I should, but I don't off the top of my head.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:14) It's alright. You could tell I'm personally interested in it. Would that be like a Comcast? Like, a Comcast Xfinity portal?

(Chris Huish at 00:47:21) No. I think you're, I mean, it could be a Comcast, but I'm sorry. I'm thinking more like the actual, like, Verizons of the world.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:28) Oh, the Verizons.

(Chris Huish at 00:47:29) Okay. You know? And for quite a while, they've been looking at how do they get content and distribute content directly onto their devices and all of that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:41) So the Stadia, I think I'm saying that right. Google's saying they shut that down. Right?

(Chris Huish at 00:47:45) They did. They shut down the business, but then they still have the technology. And, you know, part of what we're seeing is there's a lot of different forms of, or there's a lot of different companies that have created cloud solutions out there all over the world. And this is another thing that we do to try to make cloud more accessible, where we present just a single API that you can use. It's a single browser address, right, if you're the company. And you can tell all your players like, hey, go to www.moderncto.com, right?

(Chris Huish at 00:48:21) And there's slash games or game and there's the cloud game there. But under the hood, we're identifying where the player comes from and serving that game up on the best cloud solution for where they are to give them the lowest latency, right, to make sure it's the best experience for them possible. Because that was another problem with cloud, right, it depended where the servers were located, how far away you were, all of that. So we've kind of taken that friction point out of the equation as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:52) Is Fortnite a cloud game?

(Chris Huish at 00:48:54) I believe there is a cloud version of Fortnite. Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:58) Yeah. That's interesting. What's the most popular cloud game that you're familiar with?

(Chris Huish at 00:49:02) Oh my gosh. You know, that would certainly be up there. I would think that one is well known, and I think a lot of people tried it out just to see what was this like with cloud. You know, certainly when Stadia did it, there was a Doom, you know, version of Doom that was up on the clouds that was pretty popular because it's such a, it was such an HD game to be streaming through the cloud. It was pretty impressive.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:27) Nice.

(Chris Huish at 00:49:27) And that vision that you have for Xsolla of having that single URL, that example that you just gave where it's just there, there's no download storefront, you know, hardware limitations, any of that. Are we there today, or is that coming?

(Chris Huish at 00:49:40) No. We're there today. So we have that. We've also integrated cloud into, we have a site called x.la, and we've got, I think, 60 cloud games up there already that people can go and check out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:55) X.la. That's interesting. Xsolla Mall.

(Chris Huish at 00:49:59) Yep. Yeah. So that's kind of a one stop shop for everything that you might want as a player. You can purchase games directly through it. You can check out cloud games.

(Chris Huish at 00:50:10) You can get, you know, drops from different games. There's a whole bunch of content that generally is distributed across a number of different locations, but you can get it all in one place here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:25) Yeah. Yeah. Josh, show it. But there's even some Minecraft game servers. You know, I had a friend in middle school who, someone's like, hey. Have you caught up with him? And I was like, no. Because, you know, I did the tech podcast and everything. Apparently, he created the largest Minecraft server company and sold it for tens of millions of dollars.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:45) I was like, dude, that's awesome. So, it's strange how there's these little niches. You just see it. You don't think much of it. You're like, okay. $4 for a Minecraft server or whatever the fee is. But at scale, those can be legitimate businesses. You know?

(Chris Huish at 00:51:04) Oh, absolutely. And, you know, I think that's, you know, again, we're kind of going off in another direction here, but I think that is part of the future of gaming and this whole idea that the consumer and the creator have kind of converged and are one and the same. And I don't mean necessarily a creator, like a streamer or influencer, but somebody who's actually creating a mod or an asset or something for a game or a world that they like, and they're an avid player of that as well. And the ability for them to be able to share that just globally is, I think, really powerful. And being able to get rewarded for that at scale is something that I think is very, very interesting.

(Chris Huish at 00:51:50) And with the convergence of how tools have developed to be really pretty easy and accessible for people to use, and then you have AI coming in, like, we joked about the vibe coding, but, you know, AI helping in actual creation of content. You know, I think you're at this point now where somebody, just anybody with a vision or an idea can take that idea and turn it into a reality and share that with the world. Right? So, you know, if I had a great idea for some new weapon in Apex, you know, can't do it right now. But if it were, let me rephrase it. If it was like Roblox, I have a great idea for something in Roblox. I could create that and share that with the world and benefit from that. So I think, you know, how this shakes out is gonna be really a strong direction for the future of the industry.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:43) Yeah. User generated content sounds fun.

(Chris Huish at 00:52:46) Yeah. User generated content. And I think we're just still at the early stages of what does that really mean. It's still somewhat controlled, which is fine, but I just have this feeling that there's a whole generation, right, that's growing up with the idea of being able to create content for the things that they love. And the tools to do that are more powerful than ever, more accessible than ever.

(Chris Huish at 00:53:12) So what does that really mean when companies start to embrace that in what the original thing is that they're creating and making it so that it can truly be, you know, embraced and run with, you know, the community can run with it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:28) So when I was a kid, you just buy the game. That was it. There was no updates. You just bought the game. It was on a disc and that was the game. Then they started to roll out updates. It's like, oh, you get some updates. Then there were updates that you could pay for. And then there was things you could buy inside the game. And now with my kids, it's like, you almost have to have money to play the games. Right? There's just so many opportunities to do business in the games, whether you need to buy this gem so you can unlock this thing or otherwise, you just play and you don't get to unlock it. I don't love it. I understand it from my business perspective. I get it. You know, you gotta make the games better. But have, are, do you think we're gonna come full circle back to just buying the game? Or do you think it's just gonna go crazy with just the games becoming more expensive?

(Chris Huish at 00:54:20) Yeah. I mean, there's certainly been a movement recently back to the idea of premium content where there's a bit of free to play overload, right, where people are feeling, you know, everything is free to play, and it's almost becoming a tax, right, where they have to spend more than they would like everywhere. So there's, you know, the nostalgia of getting back to, oh, I just want a game I can play for twenty hours and be done with it. And I think that's always gonna be there and that's great because that allows different types of games, right? More narrative driven, more maybe experimental things, you know, that are fun and engaging and deserve to be out there.

(Chris Huish at 00:54:56) But the free to play I think is, you know, really isn't going anywhere. It's evolving, you know, to your point. How does free to play evolve so that it doesn't feel like you have to just spend to keep up? I think that's a challenge for the industry, you know, finding ways to reward players. And this has been a topic over the past few years. It's kind of faltered a bit where a lot of games shifted from monetization to engagement.

(Chris Huish at 00:55:24) You know, so we're still figuring out how do you reward engagement in a way that players can, you know, feel that they're not missing out on anything by being engaged with the game or contributing to the content for the game while at the same time, you know, you're benefiting from the free to play monetization at scale. So hasn't been quite figured out yet, but it's interesting. It's a challenge for sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:50) Yeah. I mean, look, I have my personal views. I'm not saying that they matter at all. My personal thing that I like, the way I like to engage with it is I'd much rather pay 80 or $100 for a game, and then there's no additional way to do excess business inside the game. I just know that I can, based off of competence and becoming good at that game and playing, I'll pay a monthly connectivity fee for servers or whatever. But I just really don't love, like, every time I load up Call of Duty, there's 18 new packs for $29 each that they want you to buy. And then the other players can have the guns first. They can have better equipment if they're spending real world money. And I'm like, this, I don't love that. I don't love it. I love it when I spend the money and I have better equipment.

(Chris Huish at 00:56:37) Well, you know, I think look. I think one of the real challenges is we have games that have been in the market, you know, now five, six, seven, ten years. Right? The same game. And how do you build, you know, a business that allows a game to be twenty, thirty years in market, right?

(Chris Huish at 00:56:59) Where, you know, I think what you're encountering a lot of it is, okay, this game is gonna be, we've gotta milk it because we've got about a two year runway before the game is gone. So we're gonna try to do a lot of microtransactions and get a lot out of the audience or the players, but then all of a sudden, you're in years three, four, or five, and do you need to, does the monetization need to be high in the short term, or can you build it to be low over the long term so that it still is profitable, more profitable than you could ever imagine at the end of the day. So I don't know. I think there's valid questions on, you know, what does the longevity of games these days mean for the business models?

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:46) Do you answer these questions in your new upcoming book? Well, watch this segue. Do you answer those questions in your new upcoming book, Direct Player?

(Chris Huish at 00:57:53) So still working on it, but certainly put these questions out there. You know, it's all about, you know, really, how are, you know, games connecting directly with players and, you know, how are these direct to player business models? How do they reshape the future of games? So I think, you know, there's a real opportunity to cover, you know, what is direct to consumer? How do people do it?

(Chris Huish at 00:58:20) What are the tools like companies that Xsolla provide? And then what does it mean for the business models and the marketing and all of that? So, yes, hope, you know, diving into these topics and more.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:32) When does that book come out?

(Chris Huish at 00:58:34) So it'll be later this year.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:36) Okay. I know I had your book coming up as part of this conversation, and we are a little bit over time. So we'll just record something before or when the book's being released, and we'll just do a mini episode or something. That way, we can get a bunch of awareness for your book launch.

(Chris Huish at 00:58:54) Oh, I appreciate that, Joel. Thank you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:56) Yeah. Well, we did it. We made a podcast, Chris. How do you feel?

(Chris Huish at 00:59:00) Oh, I feel great. I feel energized. It was an awesome conversation, Joel. It was really great talking with you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:06) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.