Game Producer: The Role Everyone Loves to Debate

We asked producers from Activision, Amazon Games, Bungie, and more for their insights into the industry’s most nebulous job.

Image credit: Narek Gevorgyan

What is a game producer?

Ask people at ten different game studios, and you’ll get ten different answers. But is there a consistent core to the role across the industry? What makes a great game producer? And how should studios think about hiring for the role going forward?

To find out, A16Z GAMES surveyed over a dozen game developers from across the games industry, from AAA (Activision, Amazon Games, Bungie) to indie (Cult of the Lamb creators Massive Monster, The Witness studio Thekla). 

That story below. First, the news:

News From the Future

🔫 Report: Call of Duty to be Added to Game Pass (PC Gamer)

It’s a make-or-break moment for Xbox. As originally reported by The Wall Street Journal (story paywalled), Microsoft is said to be close to announcing plans to make this year's new Call of Duty available on Game Pass from day one.

🎨 46% of Gamers List Creativity and Self-Expression as Motivators (Variety)

As UGC-powered games like Minecraft, Fortnite, and Roblox continue to dominate with players, the percent of players reporting that creativity and self-expression are primary motivators for play keeps going up. This year’s survey results marks a 10-point jump in the number of gamers who answered the same way last year.

🤖 Microsoft's AI will be Integrated in Minecraft (Windows Central)

Microsoft says it’s planning to directly integrate its Copilot tech into a number of Xbox games, including Minecraft. According to the report: “Using Minecraft as an example, players will be able to ask ‘How do I craft a sword?’ and Copilot will search your Minecraft inventory for the necessary materials, and help you craft it.”

🗡️ A New Generation of J.R.R. Tolkien Games is Coming (VentureBeat)

Lee Guinchard, the new head of the tentatively-titled Embracer Group spinoff “Middle-earth Enterprises & Friends” sat down for an interesting interview in which he laid out plans for the future of Lord of the Rings games. Guinchard, a serious fan of Tolkien’s work, says that he sees major potential for the future within the IP’s depths: “There are some great stories with Beren and Luthien. There are some really interesting things to go after with The Silmarillion. You have got to have a plan.”

Game Producer: The Role Everyone Loves to Debate

In 1982, Trip Hawkins made a bold decision. He would leave his Director-level job at Apple Computer to start his own company: Electronic Arts.

Back then, the future promise of the games industry was far from a sure bet. Even the idea that games could be an artistic medium sounded strange to some ears.

And so, in a 1983 interview with Byte Magazine, Hawkins was asked what he was going to do differently from his competitors:

“Based on your view of home computers as a new medium and of programmers as artists, how have you organized Electronic Arts differently from other software houses?”

Trip’s answer: producers. At EA, game development would be handled by external “software artists,” in Trip’s parlance, and the key to managing them would be a small, experienced internal team of producers. At this point, in 1983, Hawkins had already hired five producers full-time, including three poached from Apple.

But what is a games producer? Hawkins offered the first-ever recorded definition:

Producers basically manage the relationship with the artist. They find the talent, work out product deals, get contracts signed, manage them, and bring them to their conclusion. The producers do most of the things that a product manager does. They don't do the marketing, which in some cases product managers do. They don't make decisions about packaging and merchandising, but they do get involved.

“They're like book editors, then?” the editors of Byte asked.

“Yes,” Trip said. “They're a little like book editors, a little bit like film producers, and a lot like product managers.

That was the plan in ‘83, anyway. As recorded in a recently-published excerpt from Hawkins’s upcoming book, the plan to keep the devs external didn’t hold for long, and by 1988, EA decided to build out in-house dev teams. This, Hawkins writes, “thrilled the producers, who fought with each other for control over whatever limited internal resources we had.”

Before long, the role Trip had so clearly defined before began to morph before his eyes. Producers were becoming some sort of strange combination of people manager, team lead, product manager, and creative director. The more the games business changed, the more the role changed with it. 

Now, nearly half a century after the first games producers joined EA from Apple, we wanted to know what the role means today. Our team surveyed over a dozen game developers from across the games industry, from AAA (Activision, Amazon Games, Bungie) to indie (Cult of the Lamb creators Massive Monster, The Witness studio Thekla). 

To get a better sense for what game production actually means, we asked each participant the same questions. Their answers below.

Question 1: What was your path to video game production?

About half of our respondents got into production from either QA or community/marketing.

One archetypal example:

“I started working in marketing and communications. Then got more involved in the products I was running comms for, saw things were missing on the production and product side and slowly picked up tasks over time until I was producing parts of updates, then full updates, then entire products for millions of players on Minecraft and Roblox. Turns out if you get annoyed and start producing things, they let you be a producer.”

—Josh Ling, Head of Production at Hypersonic Labs (Ex-Hypixel, Uplift Games)

But other answers varied wildly.

Joe Tung, CEO and co-founder of Theorycraft Games, was originally a “lit crit” guy—he earned his BA in english, then an MA in cultural theory, and even dipped his toes into academia with a two-year stint as an Associate Professor at Indiana University in the late 90s. But by the turn of the millennium Tung had left for a job at Microsoft.

In 2005, Tung—now an experienced program manager—became obsessed with playing Halo 2. There was an internal leaderboard where employees could compete in the game, and Tung fought his way up the ladder to become the top-ranked employee at all of Microsoft. He cold-emailed a Bungie lead with photo proof of his ranking, which led to a job offer with the studio.

At Bungie, Tung went on to become Executive Producer of Halo 3, Halo: Reach, and Destiny.

Other pathways to production include web development:

“I started as a web developer. I did graphic design and client side development together. The web was just starting to become a "thing,” so there wasn't a lot of institutional wisdom about who could participate and how. Somewhere along the way I realized I loved game design and wanted to make a game.

The game industry was similarly nascent, so I started working on web games as a client side developer and eventually moved into game production from there. The intersection of technology, user experience and art, and the way in which it was amazingly collaborative and open was exactly how I wanted to work.”

—Elena Siegman, Former Studio Head & Executive Producer at Cold Iron Studios (Ex-Firewalk Studios, Electronic Arts, Bungie)

…and law school:

“I got my start in games while studying law at UC Santa Cruz where I was approached by a dev team on campus looking for a narrative designer for a Papers Please style take on privacy in the digital age called Project Perfect Citizen. It just so happens that I was writing my thesis on the intersection of privacy law and technology at the time, and was a lifelong gamer.

I decided to jump into the work and after nine months we released the game for free online. We were shocked at the positive response we got, and I submitted us to the IGF that year. We ended up receiving an IGF honorable mention for innovation and I was hooked.”

—Jason Brisson, Senior Producer at Thekla (Ex-Meta, Amazon Games)

Question 2: Are you a “wrangling” producer or “strategic lead” producer?

There is a lively debate in the tech world about project management versus product management. In theory, these aren’t the same thing: the former is more focused on keeping teams organized and on track, with the latter being more about strategic decision-making or creative direction.

This same problem applies to the “producer” role in games, and not just between companies, but between individual teams within those companies.

So we asked these producers directly: How do you describe your own role? Multiple respondents told us that their job has alternated from one type of production job to another throughout their career:

“It has varied wildly depending on the studio and the project. I find the split to be mostly based on team size—smaller teams require producers to wear more hats and fill more roles. I greatly prefer being on smaller teams and being involved in many parts of the process, and have many times been product owner/creative director alongside production/scrum master duties.

The least creative input I've had as a producer is working on licensed franchises with large IP-holders, where there are very strict brand guidelines. In those instances, every decision must be routed through multiple departments for sign off and feedback before making it into the game or out to the public. Even in those scenarios, there are opportunities to be creative as a producer—I think being creative within set boundaries and parameters is a better indicator of one’s ability to be creative, actually.”

—Alyssa Kollgaard, Head of Production/Ops at Akapura Games (Ex-Manic Machine, Whitemoon Dreams)

And changed between studios:

“Production at Riot and production at Bungie were essentially different jobs. At Bungie during my time ‘production’ was much more execution-oriented and at Riot ‘product management’ was much more strategy-oriented.”

—Joe Tung, CEO and co-founder of Theorycraft Games (Ex-Riot, Bungie)

Some speculated that this mixing of responsibilities is due to the fact that the industry is still maturing:

“My role has changed drastically throughout my career in production within video games but I attribute this more towards the relative youth and still growing industry of video games. Development models and roles within these models are constantly changing and evolving. In some orgs, producers will be focused on time management and delivery, with little decision making power. While some have producers who have immense authority because part of their job function is to not only focus on delivery but the risks associated with them as well.”

—Hideo Hikida, Senior Manager, Production, Solid State Studios at Activision (Ex-Riot Games)

The fact that the producer role is inconsistent across the industry isn’t necessarily a problem for individual producers. More than one spoke of it as an opportunity:

“I’ve been lucky to have had a chance to cross into both areas and to learn a ton over the last decade! Gaming is a part of the creative industry and things are changing fast. So do my professional and personal interests. That’s why I try to adapt and to pursue opportunities that align with my current goals.

Lately, I’ve been more focused on projects that require collaboration between cross-functional teams and making sure all of their input is gathered and shared with relevant stakeholders. I also had many chances to work on projects where I was an active participant in both wrangling discipline’s input on a project and was deeply embedded into the process of creative decisions and contributed at certain stages of development.”

—Yuliya Peshkova, Senior Producer, Publishing at Bungie (Ex-KRAFTON)

That said, some teams simply need a producer whose role skews more heavily toward “wrangling” than creative direction.

“While I might have creative input, I leave creative decision-making to the creatives. My role is primarily about removing obstacles and solving problems to ensure that my team can do their best work. I facilitate communication and make sure there is nothing blocking people from doing what they've been hired to do/what they are good at.”

—Kenzie Paulus, Studio Manager and Lead Producer at Thekla (Ex-Zynga, MightyPlay)

Question 3: Why do games producer roles differ from studio to studio?

Given that so many respondents described their roles differently, we wanted to pull at that thread and see why those in the roles think the job is defined so differently across the industry.

Our respondents had some solid theories.

Amazon Games’s Priscilla Tran pointed out that games studios build teams out differently based on what they want to emphasize with their brand:

“I really think this comes down to the studio and the brand it represents. I'd like to think that each studio is known for specific aspects of the games produced—could be gameplay, lore, or the IP itself. I do believe a lot of this boils down to the meaningful resources that can help the team leverage the work being built. Some studios have more financial opportunities to hire more headcount or can afford senior developers. Some studios thrive on close-knit teams that can drive their vision home seamlessly. I've also seen studios that just want to make awesome video games. All have their respective pros and cons.”

—Priscilla Tran, Producer, New World at Amazon Games (Ex-Oculus VR, Rockstar Games)

Another key factor to keep in mind is the varying amounts of bureaucratic overhead between small studios and big AAA outfits:

“Cultural differences across studios largely drive the variation of production roles, but smaller indie studios don't have to wrangle the enormous scale of AAA teams, and that means production work tends to be less siloed and less distanced. When you have only 12 people on your team you're inherently more agile. Changes can happen on the turn of a dime, and iterations don't require the orchestration of multiple stakeholder signoffs to cover cross-functional dependencies.”

—Jason Brisson, Senior Producer at Thekla (Ex-Meta, Amazon Games)

The bigger the studio, the more specialized the producer roles:

“Based on my previous experience, producers on smaller teams (agencies, AA studios) tend to take on more tasks and oversee both production and operations. However, bigger organizations can structure teams in ways where producers can be dedicated to specific areas and be more specialized, and manage pipelines for tech, art, UX/UI, etc.”

—Yuliya Peshkova, Senior Producer, Publishing at Bungie (Ex-KRAFTON)

But ultimately, the work does have to get done by someone, even if nobody at the studio holds a producer title:

“In some studios, the product role is considered a creative one, in others it's a production role. In others still, it's a business role! EA famously has a split between producers and development directors in many of their studios. Producers set goals and define success, and development directors set the process by which work is assigned and complete, and report on progress. They are both part of ‘production’ but the roles serve different functions.

Some studios say that they don't have producers at all—but the production work gets done by someone. Often the discipline leads do the production work on top of their other management jobs. This can work in some environments but usually it means someone is pulling double duty, or something else that's important isn't getting done.”

—Elena Siegman, Former Studio Head & Executive Producer at Cold Iron Studios (Ex-Firewalk Studios, Electronic Arts, Bungie)

Question 4: What are some contrarian or "spicy" opinions you have about games producing?

One of our favorite things to ask interviewees is about the axes they grind and crosses they bear. Every craftsperson who works in their field long enough will start to see mistakes made and bad habits ingrained—so we asked our respondents about their spiciest or most contrarian opinions about games producing.

Some said they think the widespread conflation of “wrangling” and “decision-making” producers can be a problem for hiring managers:

“The ‘decision-making’ producer and the ‘wrangling producer’ are as different as a game designer and an artist. Lumping them together in many cases gets you someone who’s not fit for the role. People can be good at both in the same way designers who are also artists exist, but if you spend most of your career doing one and not the other, you are unlikely to be good at the other.”

—Thomas Bourus, Executive Producer at Odyssey Interactive (Ex-Riot)

The fact that the skillsets are so different means it can be hard to teach the necessary skills for the job:

“The spectrum of production goes all the way from ordering food to scrummastering to executive direction and everything in between. Almost certainly the job looks different from studio to studio, or even team to team. No matter what it looks like, remember that the job is to create impact, and developing great judgment is 100% transferable. Great judgment is hard to teach. Great judgment is to strategy what great taste is to art.”

—Joe Tung, CEO and co-founder of Theorycraft Games (Ex-Riot, Bungie)

But unlike great judgment, not every skill you build is transferable from job to job:

“Too often producers get stuck in their own ways of working based on past experience and what should work for all teams, [and] they’re always wrong. Think of your experience as a toolbox, listen to the team needs and then either bring out the right tool for the job or develop a new one.”

—Sam McCully, Senior Producer at PlaySide Studios (Ex-Blowfish Studios)

Many respondents went out of their way to say that the ideal producer is someone who doesn’t impose too much on the team:

“More production will not save you. You can't construct a good building by adding more scaffolding if the foundations are bad. Every production methodology is a set of tools and processes that are supposed to make for easier lives and better products. If this isn't the case for your team, you may need to rethink things more foundationally. Use the bare minimum amount of scaffolding needed to build what you're trying to build, and no more.”

—Josh Ling, Head of Production at Hypersonic Labs (Ex-Hypixel, Uplift Games)

Another take on this point:

“In the past I've seen producers that enact process for the sake of process and the team resented them for it. It's been my goal to keep that kind of thing to a minimum.”

—Kenzie Paulus, Studio Manager and Lead Producer at Thekla (Ex-Zynga, MightyPlay)

Put most succinctly:

“People first, product second, process third.”

—Alyssa Kollgaard, Head of Production/Ops at Akapura Games (Ex-Manic Machine, Whitemoon Dreams)

Question 5: What are some skills that more junior producers (or those who'd like to get into the field) should focus on building?

To send us off, we asked each of the producers we interviewed for any advice they had for younger or aspiring producers. Their top tips below:

Develop a deep, empathetic understanding of your audience:

“You need to be really good at looking at the world through someone else’s eyes, and that is easier done the closer you are to what you’re making. If you get good early in your career at thinking about problems from others’ point of view, you can skip a lot of the pitfalls producers can run into (myself included) such as being too by-the-book or data-focused, or relying too much on your gut, or being too out-of-the-box creative and not rooted in reality. You should still develop those skills around design, data, and creative but don't let them be your only means of decision making. It all starts with who you are making this thing for.

—Thomas Bourus, Executive Producer at Odyssey Interactive (Ex-Riot)

Be the person willing to ask the questions no one else is asking:

“Learn to listen to your intuition. Is there something bothering you about the project, or the game, that nobody is talking about? This doesn't mean to panic when you have a bad feeling. It means that if something is worrying you, don't shut down and go with the flow—instead, investigate. As a producer, there are problems you may be the first person to notice, and you are best positioned to point it out and get help.

Learn how to ask questions without fear of looking like you don't know something. That's what questions are for! Approach the job with curiosity. Learn how to admit you made a mistake or don't know something without fear. Producers are often the people who can ask the question in a meeting that everyone else is afraid to ask.”

—Elena Siegman, Former Studio Head & Executive Producer at Cold Iron Studios (Ex-Firewalk Studios, Electronic Arts, Bungie)

Stay flexible and adaptable:

“I’d advise not to get too hung up on tools and processes and be willing to adapt. Things change quicker than we think, especially when you work in a creative industry. Production is about people and managing expectations. Projects start with people and end with them. Learn how to build relationships and trust.”

—Yuliya Peshkova, Senior Producer, Publishing at Bungie (Ex-KRAFTON)

Don’t try to force your way onto others:

A key skill I think all producers should understand is learning when to listen and when to lead. I’ve seen a lot of junior producers join production because they see it as a means to develop their own video game and be in charge—which sadly just isn’t the case.

Focusing on listening and understanding the dev teams needs first is going to allow you to empower that team to ensure they have every opportunity to develop the best game possible—weighing in and dictating what you want to see developed is putting you more in the creative director seat, which junior producers with limited dev experience aren’t always the best equipped for.

—Sam McCully, Senior Producer at PlaySide Studios (Ex-Blowfish Studios)

Consider getting experience in other, non-producer roles so you can better understand the bigger picture:

“I feel a big advantage to a game producer is to have worked in one or more roles in the game development process outside of production before becoming a producer. If you intimately understand what it takes to make a game from one angle, as well as what it is like to collaborate with teammates in different disciplines, you will have a huge advantage when it comes to understanding what it feels like to be a team member executing the work you are helping to plan.”

—Zea Wolfe, Head of Production at Massive Monster (Ex-Die Gute Fabrik, PikPok)

And, finally, try to have a little fun with it:

“Have patience and a sense of humor. Being a producer is incredibly stressful (because we are the ones who problem solve to keep it all moving) and you have to have patience for the process, your team and yourself. It has taken me years to learn how to laugh in the face of fire, but there is literally always a fire lurking somewhere, and if you don't have a sense of humor—production isn't for you.”

—Cassie Jo Borkel, Principal Franchise Media Producer at Guerrilla Games (Ex-Riot, Zombie Studios)

❄️ More From A16Z GAMES

This week we introduce a new interview series from A16Z GAMES: Win Conditions, hosted by our own Lester Chen. For our first episode, we’re proud to present an in-depth conversation with Blizzard co-founder Allen Adham.

💼 Jobs Jobs Jobs

There are currently around 150 open jobs listings across both the A16Z GAMES portfolio and our SPEEDRUN portfolio. For the freshest games industry jobs postings, be sure to follow our own Caitlin Cooke and Jordan Mazer on LinkedIn.

Join our talent network for more opportunities. If we see a fit for you, we'll intro you to relevant founders in the portfolio.

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