Thad Sasser Loves Learning, Smart Risk-taking, Fun, and MERICA, Part 2

Last October, the seasoned FPS studio exec Thad Sasser sat down with Player Driven founder Greg Posner for a wide-ranging, insightful discussion. Last week, Player Driven Design Desk published the first half of a rewind and update of that discussion, which mainly covered Sasser’s transition in the L.A. area from a hardcore PC gamer, modder, and FSP lover into a full-time QA position and, eventually, a level designer on the first Call of Duty game in the early 2000s.

Fast forward to late 2025. Sasser had been laid off by NetEase Games earlier in the year, after >2 years directing Marvel Rivals through production and a pretty successful launch (more on this below), and after shepherding a slew of other FPS games through their design and production phases to a successful launch. What we’ll primarily cover in this week’s concluding half of our Sasser profile is (1) how he generally walks the tightrope in design/production between introducing innovation to the shooter genre and nailing the basics players expect and (2) how he manages studio teams and his broader philosophy about good leadership.

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On Friendship Hostages, Switching Barriers, and ‘The Pillars of the Vision’

At one point in their October 2025 discussion, Player Driven’s Greg Posner asked FPS studio vet Thad Sasser about “the biggest lesson” he’s “learned about building for something that's going to reach over 100 million players?”

Sasser pondered the question for a beat.

“I'm going to give away some of my secret sauce here,” he finally said. “I think that when you look at these franchises it's tempting to think they've always been that way.”

“The truth is they all started off unknown, right? Go look at the beginning of Battlefield 1942,” Sasser continued. “It was a new experience. Man, I got so addicted to that game.”

Yes, he did, and we dug into his addiction to this groundbreaking shooter last week.

“What did it sell? Two and a half million, I think. Every version of that game from then on sold about double.”

“When I think about scaling and creating for scale,” Sasser continued, “when you look at something like a Call of Duty, it's three or four games in one: Single player, multiplayer, you know, zombies, Warzone. There's like so many different offerings in there.”

“It creates immense value for the players. And that's something that's really hard to approach as somebody who's got a new product that doesn't have these layers of depth, let alone the 20 years of experience of all the user feedback, of all the individual tweaks and tunings, of all the really, really smart people putting in hard work to make this thing performant and scalable and robust and secure.”

“You can't neglect any of that,” Sasser told Posner. “Thinking that you're going to rally a 300-person team that's never done this before, put them together, throw millions and millions and millions of dollars at them, like, ‘We're going to kill Call of Duty’ seems to me to be a bit of a fool's errand.”

“The way I would approach it is, I would build a franchise anew. Much like the franchises of history have been built. Start off with knowing who you're targeting. Build that core offering. Test and learn. Iterate through it. Work with the audience. Find the fun and keep chasing that, and be true to your vision and true to your product and true to your audience.”

Posner then flipped the script and asked Sasser what kills game projects fastest.

Sasser rolled the question around in his head for a moment as well.

“I'm not going to pretend like I know all the answers here,” he responded. “But I think one of the important factors is that you need to have identified who's going to play this game. And then that audience has to be big enough to sustain your investment.”

“There have been a couple of notable games that didn't have a clearly identified target audience. And when the game came out, people were like, ‘Is this for me?’”

“This caused some shooters some kind of catastrophic failures,” Sasser added. “Part of identifying that key audience, too, is making sure that you've got a hook…something of unique value that brings the players in.”

Sasser didn’t name names, but in other public venues he’s been critical Sony’s and Firewalk Studios’ failed Concord project for inadequately defining a target audience. The F2P hero-shooter launched in 3Q 2024 for PS5 and PC and flopped rather spectacularly—after burning through well over $200 million and perhaps >$300 million.

To be clear, Sasser himself is no stranger to failure. Some of the projects he’s helmed haven’t reached market, and it’s likely NetEase Games, at least, viewed the post-launch performance of Marvel Rivals as underwhelming.

This F2P hero-shooter launched In December 2024 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and Windows PC. As noted earlier, Sasser directed the project (from the Seattle area) for over two years prior to its launch, coordinating the design and production work that was mostly done in Guangzhou, China, prior to being laid off, along with some other high-level U.S. designers and project managers, in February of last year.

To be equally clear, Marvel Rivals was no Concord by a long short. In fact, as reported by 80 Level, the China-based site GameLook estimated Marvel Rivals generated >$130 million worldwide in its first month of availability. Not too shabby, if at all accurate.

Marvel Rivals also earned a Metacritic of around 75 (out of 100) across every launch platform, which is also quite respectable (Concord’s Metacritic scores were in the low- to mid-60s).

As the SteamDB chart below illustrates, moreover, while it’s true Marvel Rivals’ regular player base fell sharply in 1Q 2025, Marvel Rivals’ player base has since leveled off. On Steam, as of June, 2026, it places around #15 on the Daily Active User (DAU) game chart and around #10 on top-sellers. Both those numbers are impressive given the size and scope of Steam’s game catalog and the diversity of its player community. Total downloads of Marvel Rivals across all platforms also appear to be >21 million.

“What's the innovation here?” Sasser asked Posner. “Why is this different than what I already have? What's going to break me away from what I'm currently playing? And this ties into an aspect that I like to call, ironically, friendship hostage.”

Say wha?

“Imagine all my friends are playing a certain online multiplayer game. I'm going to go play that with them. Even if I don't particularly like that game, I like my friends. It's going to cost more to now move me out of that social situation to try something else. I'm going to need to be motivated.”

There’s a concept in behavioral economics known as switching barriers or costs. Basically, Sasser’s friendship hostage is an in-game expression of this idea: If you want to get someone to change brands, suppliers, or products, you’ll need to give them a very good reason to do so, especially if the brand/supplier/product in question is socially “sticky.” Sasser’s friendship hostage term is linked to another concept in the field of economics: Market barriers to entry. In a crowded marketplace, the cost of entry gets rises for each additional supplier because (1) there’s less room to differentiate and (2) successful incumbents are likely ahead of a noob brand/supplier/product on many fronts, making it tougher to drive customer churn.

“Having identified your audience,” Sasser added, “getting that message to them with your brand and your, you know, all of the kinds of things you're promising to the player, the value you're promising, that's a really, really important…[part of the] friendship hostage [problem]. I know it's a terrible term.”

Posner had experienced this very effect.

“I have Battlefield 6 and I am trying to convince my three friends that I play with…‘Yo, just download this game….It's so much more fun as a squad.’”

“They're like, ‘No, we're just gonna keep playing Fortnite. We're having fun with it,’” he added.

“I'm not ever one to criticize people for what they like to play,” Sasser said with a knowing nod. “I think everybody has their different perspective, their different ‘fun.’”

“More power to you. That's so cool. You found something.”

At the same time, Sasser acknowledged, it would “be nice if more developers could get, you know, more mindshare from various games, but that's kind of on the developers. They have to offer a big enough value proposition to switch these people out of these ‘forever games.’ And I think indie games are doing a great job of this right now.”

Every studio needs to identify and realize a unique vision before this can happen, he implied. As a result, a team is better off when each game designer, artist, and studio exec digs deep and works to find something unique that they can bring to the table.

“I'm fascinated by physics,” Sasser told Posner, using himself as an example of what he meant by this. “Flying, driving, shooting, throwing, running, biking, swimming, boating, whatever it might be, there's a really interesting interaction in my brain between the world and how these things go together.”

“Solving for physics problems is,” he added, “one of the very early things humans start to do. How do we build a building? How do we make sure something stands up when the wind blows? How do we keep the rain out? For me, it's kind of a foundational aspect of how I think about things. And when I see games that do this really well, I get excited.”

Again, Posner could relate to Sasser’s perspective.

“One of my most memorable Nintendo 64 moments was playing Wave Race 64. Sometimes you'd start Wave Race and it was, like, a stormy day in the game, and the waves were just huge.”

“Oh, great game,” Sasser noted.

“You're just like, ‘Wow, I'm taking this jet ski up this wave,’” reminisced Posner. “It felt so good. Innovation versus expectation. Is this one of those Call of Duty’s where they have running on the wall that always gets the people angry or excited?”

To be clear, the latest Call of Duty installment, Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, came out last November, about a month after Sasser and Posner recording their podcast. At the time, it may not have been clear the game didn’t include wall running (Treyarch did include a wall-bouncing mechanic in the game, however).

“How do you think you would tackle,” Posner asked Sasser, “an innovative change, or how do you balance that innovation to not alienate your player base?”

“I think a lot of it,” Sasser responded, “again comes down to understanding what the core promise of the game is. This is going to be different to different players, too. This is where it gets really tricky, right? What is the largest segment of your player base going to be the happiest with? This is probably going to be the core that you've designed it for.”

“Maybe sometimes they'll have quibbles about this, that, or the other thing,” he continued. “They'll want this removed or tweaked or reduced, or whatever it might be. That's great feedback. That's the kind of thing you need as you iterate through a game to make it awesome. But again, I think identifying those core values, or the pillars of the vision, and making sure that this appeals to them [the core audience] is important.”

“Let's say that one of the pillars is tactical movement,” said Sasser, running with Posner’s example. You might argue “wall running is not tactical: ‘This is going to alienate people. Oh, that's not a good choice.’ Or maybe you go arcade, and you go, ‘Oh, arcade. Wall running is very arcade and very cool.’”

“It comes back to the direction of the game you're making and how the vision helps you inform these choices...Also you should be testing, right? You should be failing fast.”

“Take this new wall running prototype and go take it to your most experienced testers. Get their opinion. That'll be one opinion. Take it to developers. That'll be another opinion. Take it to some the players. That'll be 100 new opinions, right?”

“See if there's a consistent message in this,” Sasser added. “‘Oh, I like it because of this.’ ‘Oh, I don't like it because it doesn't do that,’ or ‘This part's really cool, but I don't like it even though it does that.’”

“That requires experience,” Sasser concluded. “It also requires the other thing I talked about, which is iteration, right? This is one of the big keys to making anything awesome. First time you make anything, it kind of sucks. Almost always. I've had one case in my life where the first time I made something, it shipped that way.”

“Every other time it has to go through multiple turns on the lathe, right? You're going to cut pieces off. There's a famous quote variously attributed to different sculptors and artists, but attributed to Michelangelo. Somebody asked him, ‘How do you carve an elephant out of block of marble?’”

“He said, ‘Well, I start with a block of marble, then just carve away anything that doesn't look like the elephant.’ And by iterating over time, this is kind of what you're doing. You're trying to find that core shape of the vision that suits the audience underneath this big block.”

For the record, the closest quote attributed to Michelangelo that I found was, “The sculpture is already complete within the marble block before I start my work. It is already there. I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.”

“I like working with awesome people,” Sasser added. “I love working on multiplayer, especially on a Live [Ops] title because you can you can make changes, to see the results immediately, and get that instant feedback. That's amazing for a game designer.”

LOL, spoken like a true addict…or at least an unrepentant FPS modder.

“I think the shooter market is particularly crowded, right?” Sasser continued. “Especially in terms of, like, the action, the fast-paced twitch stuff, right? You've got Call of Duty. You've got Apex Legends. You've got Warzone. You've got Counter-Strike 2, which I play every day.”

“You stick around because of the social community, or whatever your motivations might be. When I think about that, I think that if you're going to make a shooter, it's going to be really hard to get into that space and get any sort of signal, right?”

“It's tough unless you have an innovation that's really, really good, that really, really changes the core experience.”

Two Shooter Innovations, Explained

“We can talk about two amazing innovations that have done this over the course of shooters,” Sasser explained to Posner. The first was “the integration of RPG mechanics into shooters in Modern Warfare.”

“Holy cow, that opened my mind. And I was, like, ‘This is brilliant. How come I didn't think of this?’”

“It changed the way shooters work,” Sasser said. “Now every shooter's got this kind of RPG-style progression. 30 kills to unlock this thing. You're going to do this and get this weapon. You're going to go over here and do these challenges and get this XP to get this thing, to get this weapon or the skin or whatever, right?”

Sasser was referring to the introduction of meta progression systems in shooters. 2007’s Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare indeed popularized MMORPG-style leveling and progression systems in the shooter genre. Infinity Ward had adapted long-term "grind and unlock" loops that had existed in MMORPGs for many, many years to their shooter by tying the experience points (XP) gained from multiplayer COD matches to long-term leveling systems that could last many months.

“Then along comes BR,” or battle royale, Sasser continued, shifting to the second innovation. “BR is just kind of a game mode on top of an existing shooter, right? So, a lot of games can kind of take this innovation, and use it, leverage it. But this also changed how shooters work.”

2017’s PUBG: Battlegrounds is often credited with launching the battle royale subgenre, but that’s not quite what happened. In 2009, Bohemia Interactive launched the tactical shooter called Arma 2. In 2013, Brendan "PlayerUnknown" Greene published a DayZ: Battle Royale mod for that game. That same year, Arma 3 made its debut. Greene began working on a variant of his mod for that game, and his PlayerUnknown's Battle Royale mod made an even bigger splash when it arrived in early 2015.

By that point, Greene was consulting with Sony Online Entertainment and Daybreak Game Company on their H1Z1: King of the Kill project. That was the first commercial game that launched with a battle royale mode. A South Korean studio, Bluehole (later Krafton), came knocking circa 2016, which is when Greene began working fulltime as the creative director on what became the phenom of PUBG: Battlegrounds.

The connection between modding and PC shooter innovations is something Sasser and Greene very much share in common.

A brief coda on Greene: He’s also no stranger to failure. In 2021, Greene left Krafton and soon found PlayerUnknown Productions. Its flagship investment, Project Artemis, was a Web3/NFT title. Blockchain-centric gaming has all but flamed out since 2021. Greene appears to have bet big on a poor next-gen innovation “horse.”

No one has a Midas touch in shooter game design, production, and Live Ops.

Early this month, in fact, Greene’s PlayerUnknown Productions announced it had ceased production on its game project and laid off most of its staff.

Back to Sasser’s discussion with Posner. Something that we may draw from it is that there is a very fine line between introducing an (entirely necessary) innovation to a game genre and making a game that the vast majority of the existing player base will “get” because the project checks all the other (entirely necessary) boxes in the genre.

“I think being able to find something that has that mass appeal that resonates with players—that gets them excited that take something familiar and add something they didn't know they wanted—this is really, really important to understand about your game, and how you go about making it,” he said to Posner. “You need to make sure you're focusing on not only the innovations but making sure those table stakes are quality.”

Player Driven’s Design Desk separately profiled the behavioral game economist Catalin Alexandru recently. In that profile, Alexandru implied that Web3/NFT games have never been mass market enough to justify AAA-type budgets because their “table stakes” features generally rest on questionable or unstable (read: scam-prone) foundations.

Posner asked Sasser if there’s such a thing as relying too much on player feedback.

Sasser’s answer was a qualified “Yes.”

“I think one of the tendencies is to listen to the loudest, angriest voices in the room,” he began. “The thing you've got to remember is that the happiest players aren't saying anything because they're busy playing your game.”

“It's important not to over-index on the negative narratives or the anger,” Sasser added. “There are very often diametrically opposed choices. MilSim versus arcade. Those two audiences can't really play the same game...It's not the same experience.”

“You have [to have] that, kind of, player contract: Here's your unique value.”

“I don't ever want to be like, ‘Oh man, your opinion is dumb.’ Maybe my opinion is dumb. Just because I'm a game developer doesn't mean I get to judge your opinion.”

“Let's talk about the difference between taste and judgment,” Sasser said. “My taste is, ‘I like this thing because I like it.’”

“My judgment is ‘’You're going to like this thing because it fits the vision. It fits these pillars, and you like these pillars and, therefore, I can deduce that you will like this thing.’ And so, it's more important I use my judgment than my taste.”

“For me to react and say, ‘No, your opinion is dumb, I don't agree,’ that's more my taste. That's my emotional reaction as opposed to my logical, ‘Oh, it doesn't fit the vision. That's good feedback. Maybe we need to fix our messaging around this game’” response, which is a wiser approach.

On Leadership and True Grit in MERICA

Another broad topic Posner broached with Sasser involved his approach to leading and managing a studio team.

“Let me talk a little bit about how I've learned to lead over the years,” Sasser began, in response to Posner’s inquiry on this topic.

“This is based on studying in school, having practical experience, talking to other great leaders, reading books, and so on. Just over the 20 years I've been working with game devs and probably the 10 years I've been a leader.”

“One of things I like to do,” Sasser continued, is “to design a framework for the entire experience. I want to know all of the questions that we need to answer. I don't necessarily have the best answers, but I have a stab at an answer. And I have an 80%, 70% answer.”

“I'm spreading myself pretty thin creating this whole framework, right?”

Part of the reason that Sasser creates a 70-80% completed project framework “is that I don't want to create everything to be super awesome. I want other people to come and take this vision, take this idea, take this goal, make it theirs. Because when they make it theirs, when the power of a team comes together and each person owns the vision in their own head, and they're combining them in a new, unique way, man, this is when you get magic.”

If I didn’t know any better, I’d compare this concept to an RPG-style progression mechanic that’s applied IRL to help studio team members (1) advance in their careers, (2) stay invested in a game project, hopefully, through completion/launch, and (3) doing so while giving team members some “choose your own adventure” latitude.

“Tony Gialdini [came] up with the idea for the reload animations in Battlefield Hardline,” Sasser told Posner to help flesh out this idea. “You remember where you took the RPG and you, like, stuffed it [the rocket] backwards, the thing with Dead Space, and the third hand comes in with a magazine?”

No, no I don’t…but these were all certainly in that 2015 game.

Here’s a YouTube video of the rare/secret reload animations in Battlefield Hardline.

The Dead Space Easter eggs are in another YouTube video.

“This is Tony's brainchild. He came up with this thing. He was like, ‘Oh, I really want to do this.’ When I saw this, I went, ‘Oh my…this is brilliant. Why haven't we done more of this? How are we going to measure it? How often it is it going to happen? I want to make sure it's something players can find and explore and celebrate.’”

“Or what J.F. Chabot did, the drivable couch, right?”

Sasser told Posner this was “inspired by one of his other teammates who went on BattleBots and had a commercial Segway, where he's driving on a motorized couch. So, like, there's so much of their personal individual vision and experience that pours into this game. This is what creates the magic in a game.”

I had to go look this up too, and it didn’t disappoint.

A content creator named Jean-François Chabot indeed made a drivable couch Easter egg that went viral in the Battlefield Hardline player community. Technically, the motorized couch is called The American Dream but in the killfeed—the quick on-screen notification players see in-game—it’s shorthanded to MERICA. (If you really want to sink into MERICA’s cushions, this Battlefield fan wiki lets you lay out.)

“Building a team is incredibly hard,” Sasser continued. “That's separate from what I was talking about. I was talking more about the framework for the vision of the project, right?”

“When you're talking about building a team, you know, this is something I found to be true over the years: The best predictor of future performance is past performance.”

“It's a little frustrating because you want to give everybody who's new a chance.”

“But are they a senior enough designer [that] they can kill their darlings, you know, to let go of their ideas?” Sasser wondered. “A designer's job isn't to have the best idea, it's to recognize the best idea. So, you need to understand them [potential team members] at a very deep level to make sure that they can work. And then they have to actually socially integrate with the team as well. This magic doesn't happen when people are isolated, not talking. It works when they collaborate, when they want to support each other.”

“When this designer is struggling with this thing and the engineer wants to stay late because they thought of a tool that could help them. Or the other designer created a spline tool to place objects in a measured distances because the people [working] on the map were struggling.”

“The people who go out of their way to help the other people, the synergy is what you need. And that can be something that's…I haven't found a reliable way to screen for this in an hour-long interview.”

Posner compared this to being book smart versus street smart. He added that what Sasser seemed to be saying is that you need to look for team members who can work together to deliver features that help sustain a game’s popularity post-launch.

In regard to features that can help sustain games, Sasser told Posner that a lot of “games underplay how important community is, how important it is to be able to have a positive experience in the game, where you feel supported, where you feel that that relatedness with the other players in there. These motivations for social connections are an intrinsic motivator for humans. It's one of the reasons we do anything, is we seek out these connections, right? Along with mastery and the ability to make choices, autonomy.”

Wow. For readers of Design Desk, you’ll recognize this last statement as 200 proof STD. If you’d like an overview of this behavioral psychology-based view gamer motivations, it’s covered in this profile of ArenaNet’s Crystin Cox (the aforementioned profile of Catalin Alexandru also touches on SDT). It wasn’t stated but, presumably, the integration of SDT is part of the ~75% complete project framework that Sasser builds before picking the team (to the extent he has this latitude) and kicking off the design and production work.

“This relatedness, the ability to feel connected to other people, to help other people, to be helped by other people, is a core intrinsic motivator for humans,” Sasser told Posner. “A lot of times this is a little bit underplayed, especially in, you know, some competitive shooters where they have the basics in there. You can, you know, matchmake, and find friends, and so on. But I think games, at this point should, be cognizant of how important this is.”

“They should be embracing communities in games. Now, some games do a brilliant job of this, right? But I think shooters in particular could do a better job of creating communities, embracing them, and allowing players to find their own playstyles.”

“I'll give you an extreme example. On the one hand, you've got the grognard, the people who like MilSim, who are hardcore and want to do after-action reports. I've done that, I have to admit.”

The term grognard was borrowed from French, and its means “grumbler.” Napoleon Bonaparte gave grizzled, experienced soldiers the right to complain about the conditions of battle and Bonaparte’s strategic decisions. In the 1980s,grognard became something of a term of endearment for old school tabletop and MMORPG gamers who preferred original edition games and their more complex rulesets.

MilSim is shorthand for military simulation, and it refers to hardcore fans of military tactics, operations, and leadership systems. If you’ve ever seen an IRL Civil War battle reenactment, that’s the MilSim subculture doing their thing.

“At the other end are [casual] players who want to jump in and get a 15-minute session after work and relax,” Sasser continued. “Those are two diametrically opposed experiences, but they can both exist in the same kind of game.”

“I think it's important, if you have that kind of experience, to not fragment your audience and make them choose, but let them find how they want to play.”

It also went unsaid, but it appears likely that this “level of allowable player base fragmentation” issue is something that Sasser generally answers inside the ~75% complete project framework that he drops on the table before the broader team starts working.

Needless to say, this love of community was right up the alley of the Player Driven’s founder.

“I love that answer,” Posner told Sasser. “If you look at these ‘forever games,’ they have a community aspect in it, right? Fortnite, before the bus leaves, you can all hang out. Roblox, Minecraft have just open worlds you can play in.”

I was playing Fortnite with my son the other day, and I made him play on the Switch. He wants to play in the Xbox. That's where I play, though. So, he hates it because by the time the Switch loads, he misses that time before the bus leaves. And he loves to be able to run around and dance.”

“They just need a mode where it's an open community,” continued Posner. Marvel Rivals “is going to be fine but it's always going to have a lower base number because you just have the hardcore, team-based FPS. There's no community aspect to it, whereas you see these other games that live on forever. They just embrace community. They make it fun for people.”

“It's just about fun, right? Like that's all it is. You can't measure that.”

It was Sasser’s turn to reciprocate the love.

“I love that,” he said. “You can't measure it, but yet at the same time, you can tell if it's present or not.”

“That's always a tricky question for a designer, because what does fun mean exactly? You know, there's all kinds of different philosophies and approaches to how to measure fun.”

Posner flipped the script and asked Sasser how he figures out how to delegate the 20-30% of the game he doesn’t want to create or control.

“As a designer and as a leader,” he responded, “I always want things to go perfect. I am a little bit obsessive compulsive.”

“I'll tend to really noodle on the details and to pay attention to a lot of them. It's one of the things that makes me a good game designer.”

“A lot of times I want to get in there, I want to fix it myself because I think, ‘Oh, I can just do it, it's easier.’ And that's a trap, because, I do that and it is easier, and it goes great. And the person doesn't learn anything.”

“They learned that I didn't trust them to solve it,” Sasser continued. “Now they're not going to try next time. They're going to bring me the problem. And if I do this to 10 people, guess what? I'm now doing 10 people's jobs. I very quickly learned how to delegate because of that. You cannot do everything, or else you burn yourself out very quickly.”

“Understanding what's important to delegate is where the skill really starts to become relevant.”

You say to yourself, Sasser added, “’This part is the most important thing that I need to focus my time on. I'm going to let the rest go, and other people will have to take care of them. I'll delegate those tasks.’”

“It definitely, you know, changes perspective when you're working on small teams versus large teams. On a small team, there may not be enough people to delegate to. You may have to wear multiple hats.”

“By effective delegation, you can help increase the number of features” in the final game project, Sasser said. “That's kind of your goal: You want to provide more game, more fun to the players, as much as you can.”

So, Posner summarized, the idea is “don't just do it for people, because you're going to screw yourself.”

“I empathize a lot with other people,” Sasser responded. “I've been through those experiences. I've had poor leaders. I've had good leaders. And I've learned from each of them. And I've remembered how miserable I was made. I would go home from one job and almost cry because I was so miserable working for that leader.”

“Once you've been through these experiences, you go, ‘Oh, how I react isn't just for the business. It has an impact on people's lives.’ And I care about that. As a leader, I care about that. I care about the people.”

“If they're failing the same way, over and over, you're doing a crap job as a leader, right? You need to be helping them grow. And as these people grow, you're going work with them five, ten years. They're going to grow into positions that may exceed yours.”

“All of us kind of empowering each other, supporting each other is the right way to move game development forward in the West. I think we have a very powerful game development community. And I think a lot of times it's underleveraged by the developers inside it. You know, a lot of times, we think of it as cutthroat and competitive, but I don't think it needs to be that way. I think that we can lift each other up.”

“I think other areas of the world are doing very good at catching up,” Posner responded. “I think that's…[partly caused by] outsourcing for all these years to cheaper areas of the world. People learn then, right? How does the U.S. kind of re-find its footing?”

“Let me tell you a little bit about my love of America,” said Sasser. “That America, that I know and love, is a leader of innovation, of ingenuity, of breaking new frontiers, space, the west[ern part of the U.S.], whatever it might be. We're cowboys, we're explorers, we're adventurers.”

“That's the spirit that I embrace, that I think is truly American. I love this this kind of entrepreneur, inventive, you know, innovative approach to things. And that excites me.”

“The other thing is that Americans might have forgotten a little bit of grit, which is when everything sucks, when everything is bad, how do you keep going? How do you get up that next day and do it again with a good attitude, with the right mindset?”

“I spoke to ah Mark Otero,” Posner interjected. “He's the founder of Azra Games. He built Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes.”

“He said that, as an American, we've become too soft. We're apologetic about things where we don't need to be apologetic—”

This time Sasser cut him off.

“I don't want to say it that way.”

“You can't lump every American into a bucket. But we could have a competitive advantage we're not taking advantage of, [which] is the way I think about it.”

Posner backtracked a bit. “It's an interesting perspective. I think, you know, we just, I don't like this whole 996 thing that's going around right now…”

996 is a grueling, intensive work schedule that goes from 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m., 6 days a week. Apparently, this 72-hour workweek originated in China’s tech sector, and it’s spreading.

Sasser cut Posner off again.

“That's not what I mean by grit.”

“To be clear, I do not think 996 is in any way sustainable.”

“It burns people out. It makes their lives miserable. And I don't see the benefit long term for the company either. It doesn't make sense as a philosophy to me as a leader, as a person who thinks about business, as a person who knows games.”

“Creative work gets greatly degraded by being tired or overworked,” Sasser continued. “I just don't understand how that would be sustainable long term. I also don't think it's a quality experience for the humans that I care about. I personally don't like working that much. It consumes my entire life. I lose my family time. I lose sleep. I get stressed out. I lose my health.”

Sasser wasn’t done yet.

“I've seen people go to the hospital because they work that much. I don't believe in that, as what I mean by grit. What I mean by grit is exactly what you said. When you get kicked in the stomach, can you get back up the next day and be like, that hurt...[but] even though you've taken a hit, even though you've taken that string of hits, maybe, as I know many people have in this current day and age [have]...how do you find the motivation to keep going? How do you make yourself do it? And that's what I mean by grit, that perseverance, that ability to look past the temporal and to go, ‘Yeah, this is this is a setback. But you know what? It's just a setback. And I've encountered setbacks before. And I've come back.’”

MERICA!

God bless Sasser’s understanding of what it means to be an American and what it means to be a good leader, a person who actually cares about the long-term wellbeing of others.

Happy Fourth of July and happy 250th anniversary to the one and only USA!

Don’t ever forget that Web3 libertarians like Mark Otero—the Design Desk profile of him is here—don’t always salute the same flag as the rest of us. Only one of the two flags above is an American flag.