We have decided to hire a Wellbeing and Performance Lead at Metacore for three reasons: (1) our industry’s demanding nature, (2) our company’s ambitious long-term goals, and (3) our limited patience to rest while enjoying the journey towards them.
(1) Building and scaling hit games is a high-performance job
Building hit games requires world-class performance from every team of a game company: not only from design, code, art and storytelling but also from data analytics, marketing, live ops, player support, recruiting, people operations and so on.
These teams must succeed as a joined effort to ensure all deliverables fit seamlessly together. And these teams must succeed repeatedly too. Scaling hit games is a years-long series of successful team efforts where ups must be high and downs only momentary. When you add the fact that only a tiny fraction of all mobile games ever reach profitability, and even fewer gain a hit status, high pressure is guaranteed.
Already this shows how much the job requires from every professional in the field. The game industry is undeniably a high-performance industry – and honestly, that only makes it even more thrilling!
(2) We’re in this for the long haul
At Metacore, we have a high ambition level which adds a multiplier to the above-mentioned demands of the job. We want to create and scale several hit games, and we want each of them to remain a hit for 10+ years. This will be a long and exciting journey, which demands a lot from our team.
Naturally, that calls for an uncompromised focus on caring for our people. They all share the same goal and passion towards a long-lasting success story, and their wellbeing and performance are the one and only way to get there. We want to maintain high energy levels throughout the years and decades.
(3) We need the patience to rest from the craft we love
We have had a strong start. Our first hit game Merge Mansion is performing strong and has formed a steady cornerstone for our company. Since the game’s global launch a year ago, we have tripled our then 15-strong team. Looking at the future, our pace will only get faster.
While we’re having fun, growing fast and succeeding often, it might be difficult to have the patience to rest properly. Of course, this is mainly a positive thing to experience but might lead to wellbeing issues if we’re not paying attention to its flipside. In the long term, our recovery debt must be zero.
And we don’t only want to avoid wellbeing and performance problems – primarily, we want to make things even better. We see our people as top professionals who deserve an optimal environment to make their best work every day and feel good while at it. Patience to rest is a prerequisite for that.
---
When we combine these three circumstances, the need for focusing on our organisation’s wellbeing and performance becomes evident. To further highlight the importance of this matter, the following thought has proved to be helpful: if physical ergonomics is important for knowledge-intensive work, shouldn’t the cognitive side be even more important?
We think it definitely should. That’s why we have decided to hire a Wellbeing and Performance Lead to optimise our organisation’s work environment from the cognitive perspective and help us become the company we desire to be.