There’s a global revolution in video games happening just across the carpark from a west Auckland supermarket. Meet the locals working around the clock to bring their worldwide hit, Path of Exile, from PC to Xbox One
There is something familiar and reassuring about Alderman Drive, which snakes through the west Auckland suburb of Henderson where I was born, grew up, and found my first job.
The same old Pak’nSave supermarket sits on the same old corner, opposite the well-worn Waitakere District Court and a Harvey Norman store which looks well on its way to becoming another piece of westie furniture.
But in the old office block at the far end of the supermarket carpark – sandwiched between the local branches of Public Trust and Family Planning – is something fresh: Grinding Gear Games. Just look for the steady flow of geeky types walking over from the local shops.
Now marking its tenth anniversary, the company founded by two computer science graduates from the University of Auckland is readying itself for another fix of freshness: The upcoming arrival of their award-winning PC game, Path of Exile, on the Xbox One console.
Grinding Gear Games is something of a misnomer, because Path of Exile is the only game it produces. The focus has continually paid off since the game debuted in 2013, when it was hailed as an immediate hit. Both IGN and Gamespot handed out high honours to Path of Exile in their annual awards.
Co-founder and lead programmer Chris Wilson says the game’s traditional-style hack-and-slash adventure grows year on year through regular expansions and refinements, just like the role-playing games known to have inspired it.
There’s one big difference though because, unlike card or equipment-based fantasies like Magic: The Gathering or Dungeons & Dragons, Path of Exile is free to play. That doesn’t mean it’s not a world-class revenue machine. Business has been good enough to Wilson – who also has a commerce degree – that he has joined Auckland’s “one percent” as a homeowner.
Path of Exile is paid for through micro-transactions. Ethical ones, Grinding Gear would say, which don’t affect the balance of competitive gaming at all. The purchases are purely cosmetic, with costume upgrades making characters look as fantastical as possible. Success in the game relies on skill and intelligence, rather than a credit card.
The company says over 14 million players have tried the game, and just a fraction have been paying customers.
“A traditional boxed game will sell for a hundred bucks and there’s a 90 percent piracy rate. 10 percent of people buy it because they want to. With free-to-play games, we found out there’s a 90 percent non-purchase rate. They’ll play for free, while 10 percent will pay in similar numbers to what they would have spent on a boxed game – or potentially more in some cases,” Wilson says.
Those vanity purchases, as well as a quarter of a million dollars raised by crowdfunders prior to the 2013 launch, have funded the continual development of Path of Exile, and allowed Grinding Gear to grow its staff base and move to Henderson from its previous digs up the hill at Titirangi.
Grinding Gear now employs over one hundred people. That’s how many it takes to produce a modern video game of this kind, with this year’s upcoming transition to Xbox being just part of the immediate growth plan. A Spanish translation is in the works, as is a full launch into China.
Though there are some specialists – there is just one audio designer – it is in teams that the work is generally done. There are graphic artists, developers, quality assurance testers, localisation staff, an online community management and marketing team, and a customer care unit of roughly 20 people who serve Path of Exile’s global community 24 hours a day.
The workplace, wedged as it is between those two social service offices, is set up to suit the whole army. While Wilson and his co-producers Jonathan Rogers (the other founder) and Erik Olofsson work from a glass fishbowl in the centre of the floor, the remaining workforce is divided across two distinct spaces: one where the lights are on in full glare, and one that’s plunged into near darkness.
“This stems back to not only what makes people feel comfortable, but also medical things,” says the boss.
“We’ve had workers in the past say ‘actually, we need quite solid darkness’ so we built them ‘caves’ because they got headaches working with too much light. We also have artists who need natural light, so the layout here is for people working in teams but also catering loosely for whether they need light or not.”
Wilson, Rogers, and Olofsson are attentive leaders. Wilson is one of those first-in, last-out types who doesn’t expect anyone to follow his example, but the facilities are there for people to make Grinding Gear their home as much as they need. There are couches to snooze on, and showers for freshening-up. The fully-stocked kitchen boasts six refrigerators – three standard ones and three commercial ones full of free bottled drinks – as well as a full cooking station and, out by the balcony, a Weber barbecue.
“We encourage people to make healthy choices, despite having a fully-stocked Coke fridge…”
Wilson pauses mid-sentence. “I found out we have a whiskey club.”
A whiskey club?
“Yes! I was in the kitchen, I looked up and saw there were dozens of empty whiskey bottles. It turns out that on Fridays they meet and drink whiskey together.”
Employees have formed social clubs around a range of shared interests, including the obvious: role-playing games and board games. These are among the happier discoveries that Wilson has made since making the transition from video games as a hobby – which was encouraged by his parents, who don’t play his game all that much – to video games as a career and a managerial path.
“It’s difficult, partly because I feel we’re still learning how to manage well. I want to be making games, not running a company. Every piece of tax paperwork I do is a burden. Every arbitrary form for the statistics department, to help them understand the growing industry in New Zealand, is a duty that I’m happy to fulfil but it takes away time from the game development. Over time we will continue to improve our management, but there are challenges because we are developers at heart, not managers at heart.”
Wilson entered the games industry by funding Grinding Gear with earnings from a software security job. In ten years, he’s learned more than he could have imagined about the business of fun, especially when it comes to costs.
“As an indie developer, when you start out and you make a game really fast, you think ‘that cost me literally nothing, what could I do with $10,000?’ So you buy $10,000 of art and the game looks so much better, and you think ‘I don’t know how these studios waste $20 million on a game.’
“I can tell you, to do games properly it takes a lot of money.”
Properly, to Wilson and company, means taking care of everything themselves. As both developer and publisher, Grinding Gear is responsible for making the game, marketing the game, and providing the customer service.
In a roundabout way, it puts them on a close footing with the Public Trust and Family Planning people they share that old Henderson office block with. Duty of care is the name of the game.
