3min chapter

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Soren Johnson (Part I) — Building Civilization Through 4X Design, Bridging Digital and Physical Gaming, Navigating the Evolving TCG Landscape, and Crafting Games for Varied Playtimes (#49)

Think Like A Game Designer

CHAPTER

The Paradox of a Core of Civ

The design of civilization as core is really kind of audacious, you know. And even chunking it out into those six pieces is kind of a funny thing. I think that Civ one could have only succeeded with a designer like Sid who like really has like a hard tuned eye for a first simplicity,.

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Speaker 1
I
Speaker 2
really like to explain that, the repetition, the rigor, the measurement, and then that improvement. People understanding how that measurement happens, go ahead and making those changes and remeasuring. Just kind of following that process religiously as you continue to scale to make sure things don't slip through the cracks, which can easily do when you're growing rapidly. Yeah.
Speaker 1
And then just add that process to, you know, every kind of new thing that comes. And again, it's not monolithic. You can't, you know, squeeze the square pegs in around holes, but you can measure a lot of things. You can set the cadence that you want certain levels of improvement on many, many things. As long as you're flexible about some of those definitions, the idea is just keep driving every day by making incremental improvement. What Henry Shuck, who is the CEO and co-founder of ZoomInfo and a friend of mine used to say is, we're just going for 1% better every day. Do that. It will compound. Right. And like, that was the attitude. That is the attitude. That's the rigor and repetition.
Speaker 2
Yeah. It's the whole idea of Atomic Habits, the book there, that 1% improvement. It's amazing how much of a difference that makes if you really try to live that. Just those little increments. Because rarely can we do it all at once. For
Speaker 1
sure. Yeah. And it's like, it's, you wouldn't try to bite off more than you can chew. It's intimidating mentally. It kind of makes you, you know, procrastinate a little bit. And it's just quite frankly hard. It's way easier to take small pieces. And if you stick with it, there are certainly benefits there.
Speaker 2
Yeah, I definitely have to remind myself of that sometimes. You get going, you try to do it all at once. You're like, hmm, maybe I should slow this down a little. Yeah, it's human nature. We all do that, I think. I think so. So tell our audience a little bit about Paddle for those who may not be familiar. You know, what does Paddle do? What industry are they in?
Speaker 1
Yeah. So Paddle is a fintech company based here in London, and we stand in between sellers and buyers of digital goods around the world. So, Paul, think about if you created a digital widget company, let's call it an Excel plugin that you were like, this is the best thing since sliced bread. Everybody's going to love it. And you go set up your website real quick on Wix or GoDaddy to start selling. And it takes off. If you're selling purely in the States, you're generally fine. You can go get one of the sales tax companies and they'll calculate your sales taxes and things for you. You can go file those returns and you'll be generally good. But if your product really takes off and you're selling to South Africa and the UK and Germany and England and Ukraine and wherever else, if you're doing really well, eventually you're going to need to take payments from all those countries. You're going to need to do KYB on your buyers, maybe KYC as well. You're going to need to handle subscriptions and billing. And you're going to need to pay the taxes and file and remit the VAT taxes are in all of those countries. And so what Paddle does, it does all of that. Somebody goes to check out on your website for your product, Paddle will pop up in an iframe or inline. They'll check out through Paddle on their various whatever way they want to check out, card, PayPal, any way like that. We'll collect the money. We'll handle the Forex and we'll also satisfy the tax liability for you. So we will legally take on the tax liability for you so that you actually don't have any liability around the world for taxes. And you can concentrate on selling your product, developing your product. So it is like some people would say, hey, why can't we use Stripe for that? You can, except Stripe doesn't do the tax piece. So we can sit on top and do the tax piece for small businesses that just don't have that knowledge, don't have that expertise in-house and want to do business around the world. Sure,
Speaker 2
yeah.

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