I'm your host, David Taylor. And today we're diving deep into the world of gaming innovation with a guest who's been at the forefront of some of the industry's most exciting trends. From enabling user-generated content for iconic franchises like The Sims and Skate, to launching the first commercially successful game leveraging AI agents. In this conversation, we'll explore his journey from head of central product management at Electronic Arts to founder and CEO of Proxima, unpack the lessons learned from building UGC systems, and dive into the challenges and opportunities of designing games with AI agents at their core. We'll also hear his thoughts on the future of gaming from the role of AI in UGC to the innovations that could define the next generation of experiences. So without further ado, Ron Mo, welcome to the podcast. Thanks

so much for having me, David. Excited to be on here.

Yeah. So just to kick us off, could we do a little quick dive into your background, how you arrived to being the founder and CEO of Proxima today?

Sure. So thanks again for giving me this platform. A little bit of background. I'm the founder and CEO of a company called Proxima. We're a games company that uses AI to build new interactive experiences. The first experience that we launched last year was a game called Suck Up. It was a game that uses AI agents to create comedic gameplay for players. And we were fortunate that it really took off amongst the player community and across the content creator community. And so today, the game has over a few hundred million streams across YouTube and TikTok and other viewing platforms. Before building Proxima, I ran the central product organization at EA, where we worked with multiple different studios to build systems improvements within their games, most notably working with Max's across The Sims and some of the mobile gaming studios as well. I come from a traditional business background. I happen to be at Wharton. I worked in the strategy team at YouTube at one point in time and so on. But there's a space that I find always fascinating. So I'd love to have a conversation with you. Awesome.

So we'll hop over to the Proxima story a little bit later in the conversation. I'd love to start maybe towards the beginning of your career and talk about UGC, which is obviously part of the industry that I spend a lot of time looking at and love. So maybe we can start just by asking, you know, when you were working on The Sims back in 2018, what were you seeing on the UGC side and how has the space evolved since you were there for Maxis? Yeah,

I think my experience with UGC actually precedes even 2018 with The Sims. The first exposure of it was when I worked at YouTube, which of course is all UGC. It's not video games, of course, but it's arguably the biggest platform of UGC content anywhere in the world. When I joined EA in 2018 and started working with Maxis, there were two things that I noticed. One is that Maxis has this enormous corpus and Sims has this enormous corpus of user-created content that people are using. Because if you think about what The Sims is, really it's a role-playing simulator. It's a way for players to live their dream lives, and that dream life can encompass a lot of different things. And so sometimes it's with content that the game has already, and the game has an incredible amount of content, but sometimes it takes out of the content corpus of what EA has, and that's where UGC really comes in. It really brings to life this sense of play and the sense of infinite play that we're still seeing with The Sims Day. The second thing that we were seeing in 2018 was the early rise of Roblox. And this was something that everyone was paying attention to. Many people were paying attention to in the industry. And I was advocating for EA to look in that direction. And when I first saw Roblox, it was maybe 150th at the time of the scale that it is today. But as I looked into the tooling and the systems and the monetization of how Roblox works, it's really very similar to YouTube in the sense that you have creator payout, you have creator, purely created, creator-created systems. So, you know, Roblox is not a game. It's a platform people to build on. And for me, that was an obvious moment to say that this could happen within or was already happening within the video world. It very well may happen and is happening and continues to happen within the video gaming world. So that was a very interesting trend and I continue to push EA on that front.

Got it. And so when you were at EA, what were sort of, I want to sort of better understand how the UGC system on Sims works a little bit. And maybe you can use Roblox as a compare and contrast of what the Sims tool set looks like versus what you were seeing at Roblox at the time.

Yeah. I mean,s is a game monetizes the light game it plays like a game there's a core loop of of a game and the ugc system essentially is bolted on to the core game itself so the sims has a gallery of user-created content and it has a way of curating that content for people to download and install the game. There is a set of tools that creators can use to build and upload, but the difference is it's not a platform. And so the gallery and other user-created contents were used in conjunction with what the existing assets of the game are. The second thing is that it's not monetized. So like most games, they say 99% of games, UGC content is not monetized, which means creators are building these assets purely for the satisfaction of themselves and of other people, which is a very noble cause, but it's a different incentive system. And the third, I think, is there's one piece around having a bunch of assets. There is another very deep capability around how do you orchestrate and curate and surface these assets and gameplays to the players themselves, which is as the amount of content gets bigger, it becomes bigger and bigger challenges. You surface that couch, you surface this particular gameplay mode. And that's really about a recommendation engine. And that wasn't really thought through very thoroughly by EA and most other game developers, I would say. Got

it. And so yeah, on that note, like, I guess, what were the benefits and drawbacks of implementing the UGC systems? I imagine when you looked at Roblox, you saw a lot of opportunity for what you could bring to the sims. But obviously, feasibility is always, you know, the gating factor here. like when you were leading the UGC side, like what were some of the opportunities that you thought might have been low-hanging fruits versus things that, you know, were just going to be too much work to execute? Yeah, I think it's a really good

question. And the starting point is, I think it's a business question, which is what do you want the business to be? Do you want it to be a game that has UGC component to it? Or do you want it to be something more than a game? And that has different implications on how you monetize, what features and tools you build, and how much you commit against that roadmap. And I think that's the big question that we were asking at the time. Even as a game, UGC has enormous benefits. I think two of the biggest, two of the biggest games that have ever moded, one is Minecraft and one is Outer Scrolls Skyrim. And what the mod has done is that it created new play experience for players that were different than the original and in which the developer didn't have to invest content against, which means the game lasted longer, which means you truly had more players, which means there's more variety of play, and you can sell through that game for a much longer period of time. And so that's the game model for UGCs. The platform model for UGCs is something very different, which is can you incentivize creators with monetary incentives to create content for you, whether these are individual creators or small teams of creators. And by sharing that, you're basically offloading some of the development costs and some of the creativity onto the community. You're saying, hey, look, here's a scaffolding, the Sims in which you can build a whole bunch of great content. We'll share some of the problem with you. Now that's a different model. And it's as far as I know, I haven't been with EA for some time. That isn't the model that it's being currently pursued. It's more about the game itself, but I think both are very interesting models.

Yeah, when you look at those two models, I guess I want to ask, if you were talking to another franchise that was considering UGC, what would you guide them to? Would you guide them to the platform model where you're creating an economy around UGC creation? Or would you guide them to sort of giving players the tools or the ability to modify their game and create new experiences?

Yeah, it's a really good question. And during the 2020-2021 cycle, when we saw this mass explosion in the metaverse and UGC, I think most people had the thought of, hey, let's go build a platform like Roblox, especially seeing the success Roblox had. The challenge, I think it is very, very, very difficult to start a platform from scratch. And even more so at this stage, when there are already existing platforms like Roblox that you're competing against. After all these years, YouTube is still the dominant long-form video content platform, despite a number of people trying to compete against it. And I think that's true for any. So if you're going against the platform model, what you have to bet is that we're going to be a technology business, we're going to spend billions of dollars competing in this arena, and we may not make a send a profit for a decade. And Roblox still has not made a sense of profit for as far as I realize. I've tracked it more recently, but I think they're still unprofitable. And so for that model, I think both the technical expertise required the roadmap to get there and also the payback period doesn't make sense for the vast, vast majority of game-first companies, which is mostly our universe. And so what I would actually advise people to say is probably for the companies that we're thinking about, the EA's, Activision, Blizzard's, the Take-Two's with GTA, it's starting with the contents and layer in UGC over time. And we see that be very successful with Minecraft, to some extent with Fortnite and others. So I think there's a way to get there as well. Got

it. In my current role, I oversee the business side of development of a few new franchises. And so I want to ask, if the question is UGC, no UGC, what, like if I'm making the argument internally that we should be leveraging UGC, what would be the, you know, the argument that I would make from both an opportunity, but then a cost perspective? Yeah,

I mean, the opportunity is, if it's just for UGC for a game, it extends the shelf life of the game, it extends the playability, it opens up a whole bunch of arenas. But the cost is there is a real cost in creating the tools to create UGC, to creating the services that

if

you're hosting the UGC yourself.

Percentage-wise of a total project, like, or gross dollar terms, like what would you say it costs?

I think it really does depend. You know, it depends on the play pattern of the project. If a project, I think, is generally more about free play and exploration, then it lends itself very well to UGCs. The Sims does it very well because essentially it's a dollhouse. That's Will Wright, the creator of The Sims. That's how he pitched it, which is it's a dollhouse to play in, which means it lends itself to imagination. Minecraft is another example where you can do anything you want. And so you want to bring in all these gizmos and gadgets. The opposite of the spectrum is a game like League of Legends, right, which is a very rigorous rule set. It's possible for League of Legends itself came from UGC. But I think investing in UGC for League of Legends may be less fruitful versus investing in UGC versus Minecraft. So there is this balance of, well, what is the game? Who is the core audience? Both from a creator perspective and from a play pattern perspective. I think there are certain genres that lend itself way better for UGC.

Yeah, it sounds like open world one with obviously Elder Scrolls and Minecraft and then whatever role play game, some role play games are open world. I wouldn't necessarily describe The Sims as open world because it's fairly restrictive in the exploration side of things. Yeah. But yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I guess I'm still, I still want to know just from a general cost perspective, like, do you think that, you know, if you're launching a game, you should be thinking about UGC from the beginning? Or is it more of like, let's wait to see if this is big enough to warrant building UGC tools into it?

I

think I'm a little

bit more pragmatic and I may say it's... Let's use the example of Fortnite, which is they didn't have a lot of UGCs or any UGC tools at the beginning, but they found massive success by building upon one of the most popular play patterns at the time and then they bolted on UGC afterwards and to extend it, it works. So I don't know if there's one formula to it and there's games which UGC came out at all the one thing I will say is that UGC is not a panacea for a new game which is if your game doesn't have an audience you're not going to have people who are building tools and user creations for that game because a there's no audience in which that creation is served to. And two, people are just interested in playing it. So I think the mistake I think people make is to say that, hey, look, I'm going to build a second-rate game, but we're going to build all these great UGC features. And it's kind of a cold-star problem similar to building a platform, which is if your game itself can't draw players in of itself, then they can funnel into the UGC part of the game. And so I still think that if you're, you know, unless you're building this kind of tech platform, it's game first, you have to build a game that can stand alone by itself, that can draw mass amounts of audience despite having UGC. And the UGC is a funnel where people go into to create more content and variety and accelerate and accentuate the game, but it doesn't start there.

Yeah. And when I think about the timelines and the way in which scope creep occurs over the course of a development project, I find myself sort of holding my tongue when as much as excited as I am about the potential of UGC, but, but when you've got to build, make the fun happen first, it's hard to say like, Oh, like let's put, you know, a couple people on, on building the UGC tools right out of the gate. I think, you know, bolting it on after launch, after you show that there is an audience might make a little bit more sense. For sure. This is great. Well, I want to move on to our next topic, which is that we both write a lot about the video game industry. And so I wanted to spend just a quick, quick brief moment talking about it, because I think that from my perspective, it's like one of the biggest like career hacks you can do is like to be, you know, publishing your thoughts and having, you know, the world, whoever your audience may be, take it in. So I just wanted to ask like, you know, I've read your work and a lot of folks on the Novick side respect you as a thought leader and really enjoy your article. So, you know, I just want to start off by asking, like, why do you write in the first place? What was the reason you started writing? And we can go from there. Yeah,

thanks for asking the question. I love writing. And I totally agree with you, David, that this is a totally a career hack for gaming before any industry. I started writing during the pandemic. And frankly, I was bored. There was not a lot to do. And I was just writing to organize my own thoughts and think about where the world is heading for the world of interactive media, which is an area that I'm very passionate about. And I didn't think it would lead anywhere. I was fortunate that a couple of articles in, one of the articles actually about Roblox was picked up by The Economist. And it was a nice moment where they included one of my charts and cited me as an author, which is kind of cool. But the other thing that, you know, I bought a couple of copies of The Economist for. Why

isn't it framed behind you right now?

The other thing that it lets you was opened a lot of doors in terms of even venture funding. So when I met with one venture partners who was the lead investor for my first round in investment for Proxima, the connection was because they read some of the work that I've written about the space. And so there was some understanding. Of course, it wasn't enough to fit a mess, but it was enough to open a conversation, the door to a conversation. So I think it's hugely influential to my career, but I didn't really know about that when I started. And actually, I haven't written for a while. So thanks for reminding me that I can do it more often.