The games industry ultimately runs on the creative people that make the games, and that’s who Digital Development Management, the leading video game business and talent agency, represents. The company has been in business for ten years, and today announced that its founder Jeffrey Hilbert has transitioned from day-to-day operations to being a board member and active advisor. The company’s executive team and Hilbert have been preparing for this evolution for the past year.

“I’ve been an agent for over 25 years and am ready to step away from ongoing management activities to focus on some large partnerships on behalf of DDM as well as a few personal projects,” said Hilbert. “DDM has a strong executive team that has been running the company for all intents and purposes for some time, and I’m glad to now make this official.”

DDM’s longtime President, Joe Minton, has worked at the company since its founding. “Jeff and I built DDM from a couple clients, and just the two of us into the leading agency in the business with over $580 million of deals secured from seven worldwide offices,” said Minton. “I’m thrilled for Jeff that the company’s solid footing allows him to pursue additional endeavors.” DDM’s executive team includes Maarten de Koning and Ben Judd, each also partners and executive directors of Business Development.

Minton spoke with [a]listdaily about the move and the state of the games industry in the wake of all the changes in the business over the last few years.

Joe Minton

Tell us more about this move and what it means for DDM.

The key thing is that this is part of an evolution that’s been going on for a while. We’ve been running DDM together for ten years, and he’s been an agent for twenty-five years. DDM is strong enough and has a team that can run day-to-day operations, which allows him to focus on big deals and opportunities and other things he hasn’t really had to take a crack at because he’s been focused on day-to-day. For the last year , as Martin and Ben became partners and have been oversseing the agency side of the business, Jeff has been making this transition and now we’re making it official. So for us it’s much more of an evolution. He’s still going to be working, scouting out interesting things in the business amongst the many things he’s doing.

We’re in the middle of our best year ever for the ten years we’ve been in business. We’ve been growing every year, and we’re closing in on the $600 million mark on development deals secured for our clients. We’re working distribution deals for every major territory out of our seven offices. We’re knitting together the global business. We’re really happy about that.

How has the game industry been changing in the past few years from your agency’s perspective?

What we’re seeing is it’s a world where there is no one dominant area of the business. It had been in the past — ‘console is huge now!’ or ‘PC is huge now!’ or ‘mobile is taking over!’ but really, there’s been an ‘and’ between everything. What we’re seeing is a much more diffuse industry, where on mobile there’s both premium opportunities and free-to-play opportunities, and there are different types of opportunity by region. We’re seeing strong business in digital premium sales on Steam or digital consoles (the Xbox one and PlayStation digital stores), which are monetizing really well.

The console transition to the Xbox One and the PS4 has been at the maximum end of everyone’s projection charts from a few years ago. There were some real doomsayer projections, and the high end was just kind of OK on publisher’s charts while they were figuring out what they were going to spend. But it’s been at or exceeded those high-end numbers, which means more dollars are coming into console products. We’re seeing lots of everything, but not one spot where it’s all happening. more numbers but not just one spot where everything that is happening. That has meant it’s even more important that a development studio is really good at what it is that they do, because there’s a lot of competition out there and they can’t claim to be the best mobile and the best digital premium and the best console developer and so on. Pick where you’re going to be great, we really counsel folks for that.

It’s really a different environment now, where studios have to worry about how they create an audience as well as how they create a game, isn’t it?

You can’t just have the big marketing campaign for a crappy game that fools a whole bunch of people to but it in the first three weeks it’s on sale, then you move on. We’re past that world now, which is great for games. But then it comes back to it’s gotta be good, it has to be a good game, it has to be compelling. There needs to be money, energy, and effort put into making a really great product.

What do advise developers about marketing these days?

One key thing is to make sure not to get stuck on the other side of the generational divide, and not be the grumpy old time game makers who don’t understand the fact that so many millions of views happen constantly around game play. Really watch the Twitch streams, watch the influencers, understand that world because it’s so powerful and it’s so compelling, and it’s so genuine to the content, versus an advertisement which is all about creating a momentary feeling that may or may not have anything to do with that game.

Make sure that they have some champions within the team who, under PR guidelines, directly relating to and participating in that whole world. There needs to be great care that messaging stays on target, but if done well it allows for so much more of interesting marketing campaign.

Do you advise developers to think about marketing from the very start of their game projects?

That’s totally right. Even in a very traditionally funded game, where a publisher is taking the game from the early stages and funding it through development, even in that model when we’re in pitch meetings the marketing and production teams at the publishers are generally looking at that messaging from the beginning. They’re not just looking at how the development studio is pitching this, they’re looking at how the messaging is going to be from the game to the end user even in those early meetings.

We’re seeing so many games on so many platforms, with new business models and new areas of the world opening up — it seems like a very exciting time in games, doesn’t it?

This is the most exciting time in the twenty-three years I’ve been in the games business. I’m just floored by what I see in creativity from around the world. The barriers are dropping — compelling, excellent engines are within reach of even indie teams, digital distribution — all the barriers are falling to allow great ideas to be made more than ever. It’s really exciting. I look at the Wii bubble, with its mass-market appeal, and Minecraft, which has been woven into the social fabric of our country the same way Star Wars is woven into our social fabric, these things have established gaming in a much broader way throughout society than it ever has been before. Not everyone’s going to be a hardcore gamer, but everyone’s a gamer.