The dream job of Xalavier Nelson Jr. | interview

A look at the bio of Xalavier Nelson Jr. feels like he was born with a magic touch when it comes to making indie video games.

He is a BAFTA-nominated studio head, narrative director, and writer, with dozens of titles under his belt including Stranger Things VR, Reigns: Beyond, Hypnospace Outlaw, Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator, and El Paso, Elsewhere. The latter is being made into a movie.

He also makes strides in a burgeoning storytelling career outside of games, with releases such as the cult hit comic Sherlock Holmes Hunts the Moth Man. For the last eight years, he has been running his own game company, Strange Scaffold, his own development label that publishes games that he has made as well as those made by indie devs.

But this bio doesn’t convey just how hard he works, how much he has overcome, and how much he hopes to make game development into a sustainable life.

I observed him for a while at conferences. At Reboot in Dubrovnik, Croatia, he talked about diversity in gaming along with Shawn Alexander Allen. And Nelson taught European attendees how to square dance. At XP Gaming in Toronto, he gave a talk that shed more light on his background, which included being a game journalist and writing as a columnist for PC Gaming magazine for two years.

Over the last eight years, Nelson has worked on 90 video games. That’s right. Strange Scaffold itself has released 12 video games in the last five years. Nelson said every one of those games was published on time and on budget, which he was told was not possible. In a talk at XP Gaming in Toronto, Nelson said that by the end of 2024, the company will have shipped 15 games.

“We ship efficiently without setting the studio or the people inside of it on fire?” Nelson said in that talk. “People said, in sometimes a very desperate manner, ‘How? How do you do this?’ I attempted to answer them and there is no understanding. The light behind their eyes does not become less clouded.”

He added, “They just say over and over if I could tell how we develop seven games at once. Do not do this. Is it hellish? Yes. But it’s also, for me, the only way to make games that has make sense. It’s not something hyper sophisticated. I’m not a particularly brilliant man. A lot of what we do is rooted in personal values more so than anything. If there’s anything that you get out of today’s talk, I hope it is that.”

He suggested that developers focus on something sustainable. If it doesn’t add up, you don’t have to keep going in that direction.

To illustrate, he said, “My story begins in Las Vegas, Nevada. My mom was pregnant with me. My mom and dad got married. My dad joined the military to provide for their kids. Their motel had a bed covered in red liquid that they could not identify and shoved into the closet. It looked like a murder scene. Two people worked hard to support kids to pursue anything they wanted to do.”

He went on, “I knew very early on i wanted to spend my life making video games. Let me tell you. From the outside looking in, even as a kid, the games industry does not look like a stable place to work. I saw the layoffs even back then. I saw the studio closures. The canceled sequels. This goes back years. I knew if I wanted to pursue a game in video games, I would be working without a safety net. Because that is where I came from.”

I had to sit and listen because, after attending game conferences for the last 30 years or so, it was one of the best ones I had heard. He does these talks to encourage more people like him to enter the industry, and that makes him an unapologetic diversity advocate at a time when it seems unpopular. He’s a remarkable person, and, strangely enough, we have never written about him. Let’s correct that now.

I followed up with my own interview with Nelson. Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

GamesBeat: The story you told at the beginning of the Toronto talk, about how you were born–I wondered if you wanted to repeat some of that early story about yourself and how you got to your beginning in games.

Xalavier Nelson Jr.: My parents, when they got married, they started with nothing. They eloped, but with witnesses, which was a weird event. Mom was already pregnant with me. She couldn’t stop laughing throughout the entire ceremony. Partially out of disbelief. Their version of a honeymoon was walking down the Vegas strip, talking about what their life might be. They had to, among other things, shove the bloodstained – or at least red-stained – bed into the closet of the hotel where they were staying, because they didn’t want to lay on it, for obvious reasons.

The surreal thing about this overall games journey is that 24 or 25 years later, I came back to that same wedding chapel and that same motel when I hosted the DICE awards for the first time. It’s a testament to my dad, going into the military to support his family. The journeys I’ve had are a testimony to God’s grace, and also to the American dream, a dream that’s possible within games, and that is actively facilitated by a lot of the vectors of accessibility that it has.

I also see that getting actively blocked off over time as the industry declares one thing or another impossible to do. A certain scale or scope of project, a certain type of creator. A lot of the advocacy I do today is to try to push for other people like me to be able to still enter this medium and have impact. Players deserve the stories those people make. There are just a lot of executives who, for one reason or another, don’t see validity in those stories.

GamesBeat: You started as a journalist. How did that happen?

Nelson Jr.: I was a home-schooled kid. The particular type of home-schooling we did was called unschooling. Considering life itself a process of learning, teaching kids to love learning and to improve themselves as a matter of practice. Eventually, I learned what I needed to learn. When I was growing up I hated writing, so my mom wouldn’t make me write. I would read a lot. I would do math and science and all those things. I didn’t love every subject, but I would do a bit of everything except for writing. I despised it.

When all the controversy came out about Duke Nukem Forever, all the controversy about reviews and payola and all that, I was reading an article about that. From an early age I was fascinated by video games and the video game industry. One little sentence in that GameSpot article about the controversy said that games journalists get games for free. I said, “That’s the perfect job. All you have to do is write some words?”

I went to my parents and said, “Can I start doing some game journalism right now?” My mom said, “That’s essay writing. That’s business writing. Reading comprehension. Sure.” Next thing I knew I was beginning my little portfolio of reviews for my website to start sending off review requests to people like Activision and Lenovo. At one point I got sent a $2,000 laptop after signing a piece of documentation that would not be legally recognized, because I was a minor. I was terrified, because the agreement said that if anything happened to it, I’d be legally responsible. We never had that much money. I was terrified, barely trying to type out the review of this thing, doing some benchmarking. “It worked! It’s good!” And sending in my review accordingly.

GamesBeat: How old were you when you did these first things?

Nelson Jr.: I was 12 when I started doing my first games journalism pieces. I was getting free copies of things for doing this website. Whether I was getting paid depends on your definition of compensation. For a 12-year-old I was in heaven. But the real test came later. Around the time I started to get actually paid for journalism, I was a legal adult, or fairly close to it in my memory. When I started to write for places like Waypoint and PC Gamer and so on, from what I remember they weren’t breaking the law.

GamesBeat: You had the dream of being a game developer. How soon did you start trying to make that happen?

Nelson Jr.: Originally I didn’t want to be a game developer. At first I wanted to be a beta tester because you get to play games. Game journalism seemed to be a better version of beta testing. I wanted to be the best game journalist possible. You do that for five years and you get to see people burn out, self-destruct, annihilate themselves, or experience annihilation. It was a very sobering experience. I was going to leave the game industry.

Not long after I reached adulthood I pitched and had a talk accepted at Alter Conference Paris in 2016, called “Why I No Longer Identify as a Game Journalist.” I was going to leave.

GamesBeat: That dream job didn’t turn out to be a dream job? Is that the conclusion you came to at some point?

Nelson Jr.: I thought the industry itself was unsustainable. People who had a career didn’t care about the people who got chewed up in the process, whether they were journalists or developers. I was going to make one game before I left. That became All Hail the Spider God, my first Twine game. I said, “Shit. They got me.” The process of making that game, and working on games in general–I realized I did have a love for this medium and a desire to be a part of it, to fight for a better future. I’ve kept that ever sense.

GamesBeat: What were your favorite games around that time, when you were making these big decisions?

Nelson Jr.: One of the big ones was The Magic Circle. That’s why it was so surreal to later work with Question as a writer on the South Park game. I played The Magic Circle, and it told quite a grim story about what it meant to be a part of a game’s development, and to have unfulfilled creativity, to have a game that doesn’t ship and have that creation turn against you. For some reason, when I played it, though, I said, “Oh no, I want to do this. I see the value in this. This is important.”

I remember early in my game dev career, playing Planescape: Torment for the first time really impacted me. You had games like Shadow of War, debuting its nemesis system. I’d been playing games from an early age, triple-A and a bit of indie. The more indie I played and the more triple-A I played, the more I was looking for things that were already doing different structural things, which is why I fell in love with Torment and The Magic Circle. They provided systemic landscapes that used familiar language in unusual ways. I tried to carry that forward in my own directorial work.

GamesBeat: You got hooked. Did everything go fairly smoothly from this point, or did you have struggles the way a lot of developers do?

Nelson Jr.: For a while I balanced the journalism stuff and the development stuff. Increasingly writing things with a context from seeing things on the other side of the curtain. That resulted in a column for PC Gamer that ran for two years called Inside Development. The development journey was one that I’m very thankful for, because at each stage it prioritized what would keep me going, not just get my foot in the door.

Early on, I went from game journalism to game writing. But I didn’t just care about writing. I cared about how all these pieces worked together to tell a story. From game writing I went on to narrative design. In narrative design I realized that the more games I worked on–folks gave me a shot, like David Pittman on Slayer Shock. Dead End Job, I did some work on Superliminal back in the day. A very different version of it that wasn’t released.

After I started to work on some games with some frequency, with this eye toward–as I addressed in the talk, it was sustainability. What keeps me alive creatively, as well as logistically? How do I always have something on the resume that I can use to navigate to the next job? I didn’t care so much about the quality of the narrative. I cared that the game came out, and came out without destroying people. I was increasingly in positions of management and production and business development. Now I have this very weird hybrid set of skills, where I’ll write on the project, or do design, or even consult on a wider strategic angle.

The way I approach games on a daily basis is with an eye toward, what does it mean to ship a game? What does it mean to release a game and survive to release the next one? People ask me how I managed to work on so many things. I feel very blessed, because the way my career has gone, I’ve tried to do a normal path at so many different points. I’ve tried to get jobs in triple-A, jobs with prominent studios in one way or another. None of those things ended up working out. The only choice I had was what I’ve done, where I’m in both triple-A and indie. And even tabletop, doing stuff for Magic: Gathering.

I’ve ended up having a very multi-tiered life, where at any moment, every day, I have very little wasted time. Everything I do is calculated around the games I do, the games of people I collaborate with. What does it look like to make that game ship? If it’s not making that game ship, getting it closer, I don’t waste other people’s time and they don’t waste mine. It’s a position that I recognize is very rare, and one I’m very deeply blessed to occupy.

GamesBeat: The lack of diversity in the industry, how soon did that hit you? Did you see that as an obstacle to overcome, or something you felt you could correct? What state of consciousness were you in when that became an important thing for you?

Nelson Jr.: Oh, I very much recognized early on that there was not anyone who looked quite like me or had my exact background in games. I took for granted that that would always be a thing. I’d say the actual point where my consciousness of the lack of diversity in the industry became fully aware was a year or two ago. I had been in the industry long enough. I was able to find out how many people who looked like me were actually here all along. They just weren’t on the public stage. People like Dinga Bakaba. He was working in the industry for a long time. He was just never put front and center.

Meeting people like Dinga, like Shawn Alexander Allen, like James Lewis at Xbox–there have been voices and there have been people pushing for a better version of this medium for years. I just didn’t know that they were there. Part of the reason I now occupy such a physical position in the industry is an intentional choice. I am not necessarily comfortable with it. I’m an introvert. I would prefer to, at almost any moment, be in my little corner with my collaborators making my games. But if I’m not taking both the privilege and the burden of visibility, then other people have to. Other people have to accept the consequences and harassment that come with that. Other people don’t know that what they want to achieve is possible. I take the hit, and I recognize how much it is a privilege, too.

GamesBeat: Taking the hit, that’s putting it lightly. You can expose yourself to all kinds of grief.

Nelson Jr.: I’ve gotten death threats. Even much earlier in my career. You get the death threats, the harassment, the visible or invisible biases and lack of opportunities. The piece of continuing to work in this medium that has been interesting, regardless of those obstacles–watching those people watch me and be surprised that I’m still here–we didn’t make a road for you to be here. But I’m here.

GamesBeat: Where does some of the confidence come from? Was there a particular game you made where you felt that you were needed here?

Nelson Jr.: It’s not confidence. It’s survival. If I’m going to make a living I have to ship a game and ship the next game. I have to be known for doing so. I don’t have the option to produce a “magnum opus” and get lost in the weeds along the way and ship over budget and over time and do middling sales. I don’t get to come back from that. I have to be the guy who’s in the room saying, “Are we making choices that make this game come out on time and on budget? Are we being realistic with our scale? Is the time of my collaborators being well-used? Is their energy being empowered and valued?”

I love doing it, which is nice, but it’s also just a matter of necessity. I ship games because I have no option to do otherwise.

GamesBeat: I feel like the conference business is no different. I’ve really gotta do well with this next conference, because if we don’t we’re out of business the next day. Do you get that feeling with every game, or have you surpassed that?

Nelson Jr.: The fear never goes away. Partly that is healthy. The people I know who’ve struggled the most in games are those who have their first title or two pop off, and now they’re left with the cripping weight of expectation and pressure on themselves moving forward. I recognized early on that there was a lot of unhappiness associated with the big hits. If one of our games becomes a big hit, I will be grateful for that. The strategy will be the same as if it had sold no copies at all.

I’m very grateful to God about the way things have gone in general. I’m allowed to continue to be in this industry, but also to not have my perspective get radically altered by some outlier event. My focus has been placed on the craft, improving on the craft, and hopefully enabling the people around me to do the same. I have what I hope to be a deeply pragmatic view toward games. I’ve primed my audience in a lot of ways with the same perspective. No matter what Strange Scaffold ships–it may be a game you like. It may be a game you hate. But we will do something interesting that is made with quality and with care. The next game we make may be the game you didn’t know you needed.

That’s one trap people fall into as well. They focus on the blockbuster. They must position every game to be a blockbuster, or they’re told to position every game to be a blockbuster. Like in film right now, you can’t just make a solid thing that satisfies what players want. Enough is not seen as enough. It becomes a trap that forces everyone down an increasingly unsustainable road.

GamesBeat: How many people do you employ now? How many work with you?

Nelson Jr.: We work with contractors, so a lot of it is a very flexible, floating community of people. But it now comprises well over 100 people that move in and out of projects. If we have needs and they have space on their schedule, we want to see the most interesting, flexible work they can do outside of their day job. We get games shipped. A joke around the studio is we rehabilitate seniors. People who have not shipped a game in years, who have been increasingly worn down by the expectations of what you have to do to make a quality video game, they join us and work with us, even if it’s for a short period of time, and they get to see that game to fruition.

That’s why the lack of investment we faced in 2023, when we nearly closed the studio, was so heartbreaking. We went from a studio that shipped everything we worked on to a studio that had to question whether we’d be able to ship another game at all.

GamesBeat: What put you in that spot?

Nelson Jr.: We had multiple games going at once, which has always been the strategy. It’s what we’re doing now. It’s how we started. But all those projects–we’d established a name for ourselves. We always shipped the things we worked on. Let’s find publishing partners for one or more games, just to mitigate our risk, and find some support for the things we’re trying to do for the industry. Everyone says they appreciate it so much. Let’s see if anyone puts their money where their mouth is.

It was a long, hard road to find folks like Xbox, and Frosty Pop in particular, who stepped to the plate and said that not just what we made, but how we made it, was valid enough that it deserved to continue. Particularly in 2023, when I saw the industry double down on–if you weren’t making a blockbuster, and making it according to the standard mold, then you were going to be left in the desert. Which is ironic, because I live in the desert.

GamesBeat: Have you been in El Paso a long time, or have you bounced around much?

Nelson Jr.: I’ve been in El Paso about six years now.

GamesBeat: Was there a game that elevated you to another level? Or have they all been similarly solid revenue producers?

Nelson Jr.: By indie standards, several of the games – even An Airport for Aliens Currently Overrun By Dogs – overperformed, especially for the time and budget they had. That’s been the key, the not so secret sauce. Our games are usually profitable, but they’re also made with such efficiency and precision from everyone we collaborate with that it’s easier to get into profit than the standard three to five year, mid to high six figures or seven figures indie game budget and schedule we’re looking at. When you have a game that has a $1.2 million recoup on it, it’s hard to see the light at the end of that tunnel.

GamesBeat: This seems like the right level for someone who prioritizes creativity. If you move up the ladder toward triple-A, either you’re one artist among thousands, or you’re making a game with a 6 at the end of the name.

Nelson Jr.: I wouldn’t say that. The creativity is just different. I’m a lead writer with Fuse Games. I’ve done triple-A things that I can and also can’t talk about. But the creativity is simply different. The burden is the same. Everyone’s looking at each other trying to figure out how we make games that satisfy our players and exceed their expectations, while also being trapped in a cycle of not having an institutional instinct for what it takes to ship a game.

I was told that what I was now doing with Strange Scaffold was impossible. Then we did it. Then I was told, well, you can’t do that profitably. We did that with our first project. Then I was told, you can’t do that on a larger scale. Then we did it with Space Warlord, which was on the Game Awards stage. At a certain point we kept achieving these results and people told me that it couldn’t scale. For a year or two I’ve been working in triple-A, and guess what? It does scale. It scales to ship a project on time and on budget. That’s the way it’s supposed to work.

As a medium we either do not have, or we have lost, the instincts of what it takes to have a scope, have a time, ship the best projects you can within it. Each project has so much risk and expectation attached to it, and we stack more risk on. You do another delay. Do another budget increase. Add another platform at launch. If it’s too big to fail, the hope is that it won’t fail.

GamesBeat: Do you have to cancel a lot of projects to get to the ones that are a good fit that way?

Nelson Jr.: The sunk cost fallacy is real. At Strange Scaffold we don’t begin a project if we don’t see a road to release, if we’re not prepared to make the decisions to bring it in line during that time. That’s meant that we’ve had the ability to ship games for Meow Wolf, for example. One of the amazing things about working with Meow Wolf – and what made us, we were told, a safe partner for them – is that as Meow Wolf was stepping into having custom video games made for the first time, we don’t just look at the vision of the game, but at the feasibility of it. What’s the business case? What’s the production schedule? What box does this game get drawn within?

We’ve had a couple of projects that have gone off the map. But that overall focus on what the game needs and what the game has in order to reach a shipping point guides all of our conversations around it, like any other industry that makes things outside of games. We don’t cancel very many games. Even the games that didn’t receive investment in 2023, they’re sitting on hiatus. We hope to return to them at some point and get those out the door. The ones that we can’t, we’re actively looking for ways to show some form of them to the public, so that the effort and the investment that went into them does not go unseen.

One of the tragedies of our medium is that a canceled project is dead forever. You don’t put it on your resume. It’s buried behind the woodshed. We don’t want to do that. We cancel very rarely. Anything that is not on ice for a later date is explicitly something where we’re looking for new ways to show it to the public. Otherwise, I feel, there is just a collective loss, both to the industry at large and to people’s individual careers. I’ve worked on games, outside of Strange Scaffold, that were the one game that people had worked on. Because it never saw the light of day–they’re a game developer. They’ve been a professional in this medium. But they have nothing to prove it, because the one game they worked on died.

When I see news of a publisher shutting down a studio before they even ship their first game–studios and games getting shut down, canceled before they even announced. What you have is people’s individual lives, giant sections of which will never be seen. It’s on par with the delisting consideration we’re seeing in film and TV right now, where as far as the powers that be seem to be concerned, it doesn’t matter when you erase pieces of people’s lives. The value of those sections that were occupied by that effort is not reckoned in the total value of the product itself.

GamesBeat: I watched part of the interview you did on Sunshine Shuffle, where they talked about a nice lunch on a boat with animals. You were going hands-on there and saying, “What if this were a bunch of mafiosi gathered around a table talking about whether to throw you off the boat?” They’re all in animal form still. But you start from this position of terror. It felt super hands-on. Is that the creative part you like, to take something that doesn’t seem interesting and make it a different way?

Nelson Jr.: I love the holistic process of shipping a game. I’m still very hands-on, day to day, with Strange Scaffold projects. I still work in the trenches on projects big and small, inside and outside my studio. I also get to do the 30,000 foot view of consultancy and strategy. The reason why Strange Scaffold has become an auteur studio is because I don’t want to cede any one piece of it to a different partner. I see it all as a vector of creativity. Business is itself creativity. We have a big thing to announce later this year that is itself a product of seeing business as creativity. The deal you form around something is what allows the thing to exist.

The way I see it, as long as I’m allowed to be creative, to ship the projects we work on, why wouldn’t I be hands-on? Why wouldn’t I look for a way to make the game possible? The problem-solving is the work. Part of the reason I haven’t taken certain opportunities in the past–maybe it was with a prestigious studio or a cool-looking game, but when I saw that the attitude toward that game was simply to explore new horizons, and it was not seen within the realm of how to actually make it real–even if I’m getting a paycheck, that’s not a process I seek to subject myself to. There are more concrete ways to make a living.

GamesBeat: How does something that’s extremely successful come together, in your view? Something like El Paso, Elsewhere. This is going to be adapted–is it a show, a movie?

Nelson Jr.: What’s been revealed is a feature film.

GamesBeat: How would you look back on that? Was there something about the creative process that helped that game succeed?

Nelson Jr.: Even I Am Your Beast, which is now one of the most wishlisted games on Steam, that game was canceled twice internally. The first time it was put on ice because we didn’t have the bandwidth when we started development. The second time was because we had to cut projects in order to see El Paso released and figure out whether the studio would survive in 2023. A bunch of people saw it and passed on it. The game did not have the smoothest road to launch. But then it debuts and does really well. We believe we made a good game, but I’ll be honest. I don’t understand, completely, why it’s doing so well. I know our reputation and our track record is a piece of it. That’s been a foundational strategy behind the business.

But this is part of the reason I’m so upset about all the cancellations that have been happening lately. The back room 4D chess to try and figure out whether a game is going to be profitable before it ships–often we don’t know! You can have the best figures in the world. You can even have wishlist numbers. That game still, for some cosmic reason, doesn’t turn out. There’s a Bible verse that I love – “the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.”

I Am Your Beast is a good game, but it’s just another game. That’s the one that explodes? That’s the story of so many things that happen throughout history. The game industry is not just cutting itself off, but it’s cutting its players off from finding their next favorite game by attempting to politick and calculate what’s going to be a hit before something even touches players’ eyes.

GamesBeat: Stranger Things VR, how did that come together? How were you able to work with folks on that level of the entertainment industry?

Nelson Jr.: Getting known for shipping games certainly helps. But there’s a wider thing to be discussed here about how we talk about our creative contributions as well. Stranger Things, the way that project went down, we’d just been in each other’s orbit for a long time. The right opportunity came up. I was still out here making games, and so they knocked on my door and said, “Do you want to make this game with us?” I said yes.

That’s how Reigns happened. We were mutuals on Twitter. I made a pun about something like–I did a long pun thread that ended with the punch line “Purple Reigns.” A few months later they came to me and said, “Our next Reigns game is about music, about a rock band in space. Do you want to work together?” The more you make, the more you get opportunities to make things. It’s why I feel a way when the industry robs people of the ability to make their next thing.

GamesBeat: What do you think is the fix for the state we’re in, then? What should companies be doing? What could help?

Nelson Jr.: It’s a holistic, many-faceted issue. But I think one key to this overall environment is that–I’m figuring out how much I can say. One key to this overall environment is that we have to trust creative voices. They are what our players are asking for. There are games that have been canceled, that aren’t signed at all, that are seen as not worth making because they can’t be the next Fortnite. The fact that not every game needs to be Fortnite–I love Fortnite. Fortnite is great. I max out my battle pass every season now that they have zero build mode. Players aren’t asking us to make the next Fortnite. In some cases they’re asking us not to, because they already have Fortnite!

They want experiences that can fill multiple spaces in their lives. We need small games and medium-sized games and big games, because those are the games that our players are asking for. Those are the games our players are playing. When we have all levels, from indie to triple-A, saying that a game isn’t worth making unless it will be the largest, most profitable, most Fortnite-fighting thing that exists, then we’re taking options away from our players.

It breaks my heart, because there are people who won’t have jobs tomorrow. Every time we make a $200 million game, that means we killed 10 $20 million games, or 200 $1 million games. We are making choices. This is game design. When the $200 million bet fails, or worse yet, doesn’t get to come out at all, and $200 million just disappears into the ether, canceled or abandoned or delisted after a few months because it was judged not profitable enough, I mourn. It’s cool to see a validation point that the audience wants games of all shapes and sizes, but people are being destroyed because investment centers do not have players first and foremost. They’re judging things as not worth making before they even reach players’ hands.

GamesBeat: You don’t buy into the notion that there’s an unlimited amount of money that can come into the game industry.

Nelson Jr.: No. We have more money coming in than ever. We have the data. Revenue is stagnating. We have less games coming out, to a degree. In aggregate those games have a lower chance of making a return. The money fountain is spraying money at us, and we’re setting that money on fire without the benefit of even staying warm.

The space for coexistence, for Fortnite to coexist alongside Balatro, is there. More people are playing games than ever. More people are playing different games than ever. We’re giving those people less things that can occupy less total space in their lives. We’re trying to make the one Destiny-style game and deny all these other titles in the process. I feel like I’m mourning my industry before it’s “died.” We have all the tools for sustainably making great games profitably, and for all these things to coexist in the same space. But I see people saying that it’s not enough.

GamesBeat: Are you worried that diversity is going to die with it? Is there a way we can stop that from happening?

Nelson Jr.: Diversity isn’t truly alive right now, if I’m going to say something truly spicy. Lots of women and queer teams and black people are pitching games and they aren’t getting funded already. It’s not a question of whether diversity behind the scenes is going to die. It’s whether we’re going to start supporting it in the first place. What we’re doing now isn’t necessarily working either.

One thing that we can control, in some regard, is execution. We can’t control the result of any game. To a degree, we can’t move the centers of capital. That’s why they have so much power. That’s why developers cater their pitches to satisfy them. But the one thing we can all do is have a shipping mindset. How do we get this game out on time and on budget? How do I work, as a person, so that when I come into the room, I know how long it takes me to make an asset, to make a plan? How often are my plans correct? How can I refine that process to be more accurate, higher quality, on the behalf of our players?

Everyone can, right now, today, become better at shipping games. On the investment side, respect teams that ship games. The question only remains whether or not we have the time to do so before it’s too late. That’s something I’ve been talking about a lot with people. The fact that we did not, as a medium, crash in 2023 means that we haven’t had the forest fire effect. After a forest fire, the entire forest experiences a period of regrowth. You have an open ground for building again. Things rebuild from the ashes. A disaster can still happen and it should be recognized as a disaster, but there’s an opportunity and a need and a space to build.

The thing about games–because the current sporadically successful gambling-centric perspective that rules our development and publishing strategy at this moment–because we did not receive one, single, definitive answer against it in 2023, there’s no crash to point to and say, “We have to change.” As we entered 2024, I’ve seen both publishers and developers not changing, and it scares the living fuck out of me.

GamesBeat: Can you really do seven things at once, work on seven games at once?

Nelson Jr.: When will this article go out?

GamesBeat: A matter of days or weeks. Not a particular date just yet.

Nelson Jr.: Right now, inside of Strange Scaffold, we’re in active production right now on one, two, three, four, and we just shipped five. As of this interview, because we just shipped that fifth thing, and we’re about to ship the fourth thing, we have five things we’re working on. We had a peak of nine in 2022. I’m doing all that on top of freelance work with folks like Magic: The Gathering, Fuse Games, and other things like Isopod with the Sbug Games team, which is so cool. If it’s not possible, then I’m not real. That has been suggested. Maybe there’s further investigation to be done.