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Usually I spend my time on the Byteside podcast chatting to creatives or engineers about things they've been hard at work building for the future. So on the surface it seems strange to say we're here to talk to two people from the Wizards of the Coast marketing team - but, for me, Greg Tito and Shelley Mazzanoble come to the show with the same sense of creative energy.
As the co-hosts of Dragontalk, the official Dungeons & Dragons podcast, they do a lot more than just talk about the latest news and new release updates about the game. They have spent 7 years and 350+ episodes becoming part of the heartbeat of D&D, interviewing the team behind the scenes and introducing us to guests from across the worldwide to deepen our shared love of the game and its community.
The podcast has been so wonderful they are just about to release a book about the Dragontalk podcast and the lessons they've learned about the game but also life, the universe and everything else.
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This episode was sponsored by IBM
The nature of trust and security online has been a big challenge throughout the pandemic, but the events of 2022 have tested these issues like never before. We had been planning this sponsored episode for many months, but when it fell into place this turned out to be an excellent time to talk to Chris Hockings, APAC CTO at IBM Security about the state of security and trust in Australia today.
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We're talking to Elaine and Craig Beckett from Sydney's Trackdown Studios about how the studio has built a stellar reputation across the world for the quality of its audio production for film, TV and videogames. From Mad Max Fury Road to The Crown, World of Warcraft to The Boys, Trackdown has been involved with making some of the world's biggest productions sound their very best.
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Rosie Barnes is a mechanical engineer working in wind farm and clean energy technology and during the pandemic she started sharing her knowledge via YouTube. From explaining the basics to going deep with other experts, she's working hard to build that clean energy future – and help the rest of us understand it better while she's at it.
We talk about her career, her YouTube channel (Engineering with Rosie), the value in working to communicate niche knowledge to online audiences, and the journey for women in engineering, and more.
You can also catch this episode as a video on the Byteside YouTube channel here.
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Slack proved its value during the past few years and its addition of Huddles in 2021 helped to find a great new middle ground between formal video meetings and text chat for general updates. Huddles is now being extended with new features to make it even more useful for quick creative brainstorms and catch ups that help end the game of hunting people's calendars for 30 minute timeslots.
We're chatting to Rob Seaman, Vice President of Product at Slack, to learn more about what's new in Huddles and how Slack has learned about its value to customers during the pandemic.
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It's our 73rd episode of the Byteside podcast but it was also our first time recording as a video podcast! Will it be the last? Nic Healey and Seamus Byrne catch up on recent news - Seamus digs Meta's VR Visual Turing Test and isn't so down on Diablo Immortal as a very casual bit of mobile fun. Nic found a Metaverse pop up shop in Melbourne? Plus what the guys have been watching lately. Including the amazing Exandria Unlimited: Calamity.
Go see the full video version at the Byteside YouTube channel.
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It's great to get back into a pub and have a draft of the good stuff again. But moving beer from brewery to bar is a logistical mess that only got harder during lockdowns. Konvoy has been helping brewers make all that easier with data-enabled kegs and a system that not only makes moving them around more efficient but also lowers their carbon footprint. Win, win. We're talking to Adam Trippe-Smith, owner and founder of Konvoy, about making beer easier to move around.
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For a long, long time, Australian federal governments have left game developers out in the cold when it comes to simple support mechanisms like tax offsets. In 2021, the government announced the Digital Games Tax Offset – a big step forward for supporting investment in game development in Australia.
But how good is the detail in the DGTO? Yes, broadly, it's great that it exists, but Ben Thompson from Techlever, an expert in R&D tax support structures, has noticed there's a lot of exclusions that make it very difficult for small and mid sized developers to feel like they can rely on this new mechanism. We chat to Ben on this episode!
Submissions for feedback on the DGTO draft close April 18! Details here.
Read Ben's summary of his concerns at Techlever here.
And follow the industry body's insights on all things Australian game development here.
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Games publishers usually have a notorious reputation for being money grubbing beasts who want to wring every last drop of creativity from talented game makers as quickly as possible until the talent loses faith in the games industry and quits, making room for new talent. Rinse and repeat.
And then there's Devolver Digital.
Devolver is a games publisher that has specialised in publishing quirky indie games - like Disc Room, Carrion, Fall Guys and Inscryption - and helping everyone have a pretty great experience through the process. And building its own weird, wonderful persona along the way.
I wanted to understand how Devolver has pulled it off, so late last year I caught up with Robbie Paterson, Marketing Manager of Devolver Digital. I've been particularly fasciated by Devolver's infamous, bizarre - and utterly compelling - series of E3 video press conferences that really seemed to take Devolver to a new level of anti-marketing craziness that has also had some Black Mirror style moments where...
Honestly, I adore how Devolver has managed to stay super weird while it seems to have grown in stature in the industry. If anything it's only gotten weirder. If you don't know them, it's hard to describe it all just by talking about it. You need to hear some of this insanity for yourself to even scratch the surface.
I caught up with Robbie well ahead of the company's IPO in November, when the company listed on the AIM in London at a valuation of over a billion Aussie dollars. So, with that billion dollars in mind, let's dive into my chat with Devolver Digital Marketing Manager, Robbie Paterson.
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We speak to the two creative developers behind the Fortnite ANZ project – Simon Bell from Alliance Studios and R-leeo Maoate from Zen Creative – and get their thoughts on how Fortnite's creative tools are evolving to give them increasingly exciting capacity to make huge virtual experiences. From the fun of building this new ANZ experience to how far things could go in the future, it's a fun chat with two creative talents who are excited by just how far these tools can go in the years ahead.
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We last spoke to Media Molecule Studio Director Siobhan Reddy just before the pandemic rocked the world. For a studio so focused on highly creative games, from Little Big Planet to Tearaway and their amazing current focus, Dreams, how has the crisis impacted on their own creativity? And what does it mean to make cool experiences that also give users the chance to create? It's always a treat to chat with this Australian industry leader killing it on the world stage, so settle in and enjoy.
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Pentanet has grown rapidly in just four years, though it's still only available in Perth. But in our chat with Founder Stephen Cornish we learn why perfecting one of the world's most advanced wireless mesh network technologies in one city is the best way to prepare it for wider deployment in future. We also talk about the origins on Pentanet, his love for League of Legends, the potential of an Australian esports hub in Perth to get better connections to Asian servers, and what GeForce Now cloud services mean for the future of every digital experience we have.
Cornish is building local but thinking global. Fascinating insights abound.
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We talk to Far Cry 6 Narrative Director Navid Khavari about putting a story with heart into a game best known for its flambuoyant and chaotic open world environments. With a great line up of actors and an effort to dig a little deeper on building a believable story, Khavari talks about his team's effort to make Yara a place you could feel something for.
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Back in March, Meason Camille became the first Australian drafted into the NBA 2K League. Maybe some of you misheard me and were thinking "hang on, there's a bunch of Aussies in the NBA" we're talking about the esport, NBA 2K. It might be digital but Meason, or Mace, or Milo, had to be drafted by a real NBA team to get his shot at going pro. He worked hard, he missed out more than once, but in the fourth season of the pro league he got the call he was dreaming of – the Detroit Pistons wanted him on their team. So now, with a full season under his belt and hoping to get home... eventually... we're having a chat with our Aussie 2K star to hear all about the journey.
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Feeling a little sad because the Tokyo Olympics finished last week? I am too. With so much of life in lockdown right now we had a great timezone match up here in Australia to enjoy the event, and while there was no one in the stands it was great to see it happen in the midst of such a tough time for the world.
In good news, you won't have to wait much longer for your next hit of Olympics action because the Beijing 2022 Winter Games is actually just months away – it kicks off February 4.
And this week on Byteside we're talking to one of the Irish athletes preparing for those winter games in one of the craziest sports ever conceived. Brendan Doyle is an Irish skeleton racer – that's the one where they throw themselves face first down the high-speed ice track.
I'm speaking to Brendan because it turns out that virtual reality headsets are actually a fantastic way to practice and visualise tracks when you're not on the actual track. So in this chat we talk about his choice of sport, his arrival at using VR gear to help up his game, and how having a headset for training offers other benefits to his routine.
You can go find him yourself online too, he's @facedoyle on Twitter and slidingirish.com is his home on the web.
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If you've been watching the Olympics at the moment you may well be feeling inspired to get fit or get into a sport, but the pandemic is also still out there so gyms aren't as attractive as they have been and team sports also pose their challenges right now. In that sense it seems like a great time for home cycling – a sport you can experience on a bike in your own home. But if you want to make it compelling, you need some kind of smart tech or video game idea to guide and motivate you.
You can see where I'm going with this, can't you. Yes, Zwift has carved out a patch in this space as a video game experience that is all about cycling and doesn't take the fitness class approach to exercise in the home.
Today I catch up with Wes Sulzberger, the Country Manager for Zwift in Australia and New Zealand, to find out a lot more about the thinking behind Zwift and the video game / exercise hybrid sim experience it offers. Wes actually joined the company from a background in professional cycling, so we talk about his own journey of discovering and accepting that indoor cycling can feel rewarding.
We spoke ahead of the Olympics, while the Tour de France was still in full swing, and shortly after Zwift had run a series of Olympic Virtual Series events in the build up to the Tokyo Games.
I ask a lot of questions to try to tease out as clear an understanding as possible about what Zwift really is and how the experience works. I'm sure the proof is in the pudding, but hopefully this helps paint the picture of how Zwift balances the entertainment of a video game with a true riding simulation for those eager to focus on the fitness experience.
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The most obvious part of the work from home era has been the need to stare at webcams while wearing headsets to hear and be heard as clearly as possible. These are the tools we've either put up with in their most basic form directly through our built-in laptop parts or we've hunted for upgrades – and often found stores sold out of anything at all.
Today I'm talking to Andy Hurt, Managing Director of Poly ANZ, about his company's perspective on this shift in our needs. Poly has over half a century of pedigree in business-grade AV conferencing tools – it made the communications headsets worn by the Apollo 11 crew when it landed on the moon. When office life was the norm you probably used their equipment in a conference room or as a headset if you take lots of calls each day.
Poly has had a lot of change in its own business over recent years, not just as the pandemic has seen it increase its availability of hardware designed for work from home users. The company used to be known as Plantronics, and in 2018 acquired Polycom before changing its name in 2019.
I'll stop there, because I kick off the conversation with Andy by asking for his version of how Poly has evolved in recent years. Let's jump in there and let him explain the rest.
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Steve Cottam is the CEO of Antstream Arcade, and I caught up with Steve for Byteside to talk about the origins of his plan to launch an independent game streaming service and all the ways they're adding features to make playing classic games through the Antstream platform feel that little bit extra.
Check out Antstream Arcade via https://www.antstream.com/
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If you're hearing this, you're in the right place. We're consolidating our wider shows about games and technology into the One True Byteside podcast, so we'll have lots more interview shows appearing here going forward alongside our episodes with journalist friends discussing the news and weirdness of any given week.
If you need to find us in a specific app, or want to share Byteside details with a friend, here's all the details.
Pocket Casts: https://pca.st/itunes/1482077503
Overcast: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/overcast-podcast-player/id888422857
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1482077503
Google Podcasts: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5hY2FzdC5jb20vcHVibGljL3Nob3dzLzA0NzA5ZTVkLWU0ZTQtNDk0Ny1hYmNmLTYyZDM3MmIyZTFiNg
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/43tUBmO4DknkGbd4Hw9dlb
RSS: https://rss.acast.com/byteside
And get loads more written content at byteside.com.
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Seamus has Nic Healey back as a guest host this week to discuss the Gravitas Glory esports beer, Nic's desperation in still trying to get his hands on a PlayStation 5, and our thoughts on whether we're really enjoying the Loki series on Disney+ or just in love with its aesthetic.
Plus we count down some of the shows we're really excited about coming soon, including the Alien series being led by Noah Hawley, Good Omens Season 2, Succession Season 3, and Ted Lasso S2.
As mentioned in this episode, we're consolidating the Byteside podcasts into this main show going forward, so if you're subscribed to Byteside then there's nothing else you need to do! If you've been following the rest of our shows but not Byteside then it's a great time to subscribe for all our regular interviews with great minds across games and technology.
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