healthcare. “I love being in a place where it is going to shape many things in the decades ahead. It’s fortunate to be in the right place for that.”


LEVERS FOR GROWTH Earlier this year, soon after being unveiled as Keywords CEO, Bodson revealed that he wanted to double the size of the company, to 20,000 people, which would put the company on the scale of the Embracer Group, Ubisoft and Netease in terms of headcount. Already in his first year Bodson has seen Keywords grow by 35%, which, despite all the acquisitions over the last twelve months, more than two thirds of which has been achieved organically. “We’re all searching for the right talent, but ultimately” he says, “It’s [about] really strong demand; the extra demand of content everywhere - that dimension of many things that need to land at the same place at the same time.”


“It really feels like a start- up, still today. People know each other well. It’s truly entrepreneurial. That’s what I love. I think there’s something really unique about that.” In his first months at the helm, Bodson and his team


identified five levers for growth, the first of them being around establishing more strategic partnerships with client studios and publishers; to be more predictive of issues and opportunities rather than reactive. “We can look forward - what does 2027 look like? What titles are coming up? How do we plan the resources accordingly? What kind of talent do we need to have? What kind of pain points do we have? What teams-per-game do we need?” Bodson wants each studio within Keywords to keep its core strengths and continue to run their own business, while being ready to develop more embedded and interconnected relationships with partners. Bodson has also recognised growth opportunities


in technology, citing his early experiences at Amazon as indicative of his long-standing interest and regard for digital innovation. As an example, he brings up the recent acquisition of Mighty Games, a mobile studio known for its AI-based testing platform. “It’s fairly simple, but what it does is plays a game 20-50 times the speed of what a human would do.” The benefits of such a system are immediately obvious. “It’s actually pretty cool to see,” adds Bodson. “As a dev, instead of doing a linear


October/November 2022 MCV/DEVELOP | 15


path of developing the game, I’ll pass it on to the QA team and you can see in real time where are the bugs, how much it’s improving, what’s the playability like.” While the system can’t supply emotional responses of the kind a human player would give, having that kind of scalable real-time feedback delivered at high speed clearly has benefits. “We’re doing the same in localisation, where one of


our partners, Microsoft, gave us a set of titles [saying] we need the translation turnaround time to be 48 hours.” Fifteen games in 31 languages, no less. To achieve this feat required not just cutting edge AI systems, but a community of translators and reviewers working dynamically to deliver on time and to scale. The aim is to use the same approach that’s been applied to QA and localisation and embed it across more and more service lines, not purely for the sake of it, but to be able to process future content demands to the kind of scale Keywords sees coming in the years ahead. Third on the list of aids to growth focuses on core


values and key principles; what Bodson calls One Keywords - “the common spine of what brings us together”. Fundamentally it’s about collaboration, but also amplifying the voice of each studio while allowing them to retain their “entrepreneurial DNA” on which the previous Keywords CEO and his successor place so much stock. Talent is fourth, and while it’s tempting to assume


the acquisition of talent will occur naturally as a consequence of the organisation’s strident M&A strategy,


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60