Behind the Scenes:
Meet Product Manager, Vasu Chaturvedi
With Fableborne, we challenge mainstream esports and web3 gaming alike. To achieve our bold vision of accessible competitive experiences on mobile devices, having the best industry talent is paramount. Take a gander ‘Behind the Scenes’ and meet the team who is innovating the industry, here at Pixion Games.
In the first ‘Behind the Scenes’ interview, we’re meeting Vasu Chaturvedi, who is the Product Manager at Pixion Games, working on Fableborne and Pixion League. He is the true backbone behind Lunchtime Esports, our vision of brining esports in an accessible way to mobile devices. With more than 12 years to count, Vasu is a true industry veteran, former semi-professional Overwatch player, voracious reader, and proud pet dad.
Nice to have you, Vasu! Can you tell us a little bit about your background and how you became a Product Manager at Pixion Games?
Yeah absolutely, I started off in the game industry back in 2010, working as a writer for one of India’s premier gaming communities. This was right on the cusp of the F2P and mobile era and I knew I wanted to work on the development side of things, so I started to experiment with Unity and UDK and participated in game-jams with my own team. We’d participate in different game jams to just learn more and work on some cool ideas, and that’s how I shipped my first game. After that, I got headhunted by Square Enix, they wanted to publish titles developed by Indian Game Developers and wanted to establish their presence in the region. We worked to highlight the strong talent and potential that the Indian gaming market has (even before the surge of mobile gaming in India).
After my time at Square Enix, I took a different career pivot, and worked as a Legislative Advisor to a Member of Parliament. But even while I was working in public policy, drafting speeches and bill amendments, I was constantly drawn back to gaming. After that I worked as the Chief Gaming Officer for Global Esports, India’s premier esports organization, managing the entire esports division. Some time later, I got headhunted, this time by Garena. They wanted to develop an esports ecosystem for their game Free Fire, and they wanted someone to lead the Esports Operations.
We managed to grow the Free Fire ecosystem to millions of players in India, average viewership climbed from 10,000 to 500,000+ viewers, we were competing with PUBG Mobile, which was a behemoth at the time and were slowly chipping away at their dominance. Ultimately, we were able to scale our events to 400,000+ teams.
And then came, Free Fire World Series, where we hit the world-record of 5.4 million viewers of which 1.9 million came from India. Unfortunately, due to COVID-19, Indian teams were not allowed to travel for the event. But even then, we were able to have 1.9 million viewers watching Free Fire Esports, which was one of our biggest wins and it validated all the hard work over the past year.
After working on premier events in Free Fire, I wanted a different challenge. At the start of my career, I missed out on the golden era of Free-to-Play, when the playbook was being written. I couldn’t miss it again with web3, so I started to look for interesting projects backed by a team that wants to make a real difference and add value to the ecosystem.
And that’s how I ended up at Pixion Games :)
That’s an incredibly impressive resume. Why did you start working on Esports-related projects in general? Are you a competitive gamer yourself?
I’ve always been a competitive gamer, my first bout came when I was 9 and started competing in Counter Strike tournaments. I kept that up until CSGO released, after that I pivoted from esports to game dev. But I was constantly drawn to competing and when Overwatch came out, I was back into this side of the industry. I started competing and winning tournaments domestically.
During this time, I went from being an esports player, to a coach, representing India at the Overwatch World Cup in 2019. I learned quite a bit during my time as a competitive player, and I wanted to take that perspective and experience and combine it with my experience with major-publishers like Square Enix and Garena to turn the tide on how esports ecosystems can work and sustain themselves long-term for both players and stakeholders.
What do you think makes Fableborne unique on the market? What do you like the most about the game?
For me, Fableborne is an excellent combination of strategy and Action RPG. I love the nuances of the game and how it meshes both the genres together. The gameplay seamlessly blends action elements by creating tension, drama and depth when you’re a raider while giving you control to explore bases and create your own designs to beat others as a builder.
The duality of the experience and being able to tap into different types of players is what truly sets us apart. We’re able to engage players from a casual, mid-core and engaged player perspective. Whether you’re a builder, a raider, an investor or a serious competitor. There’s an experience for you to be unlocked while playing Fableborne.
Can you explain what your role as a Product Manager entails in the development and marketing of Fableborne?
As a PM, working on Fableborne, my role focuses on conceptualizing and planning our overall strategy for our competitive ecosystem. At Pixion, we aim to create a strong and cohesive esports infrastructure that is able to sustain itself and provide value to the players and stakeholders. We’re working on creating a new segment in the industry, called Lunchtime Esports and to enable that, we have to create, iterate and develop our Pixion League ecosystem.
As part of it, It’s my goal to analyze, understand and ideate strategies on how we can grow the ecosystem, what are the challenges that we’ll face and how we’d overcome them. It’s an interesting and challenging role, I get to work with different teams, brainstorm ideas, understand different perspectives, align on our overall vision and current priorities to craft our competitive esports infrastructure.
This intersection of different teams, perspectives and moving parts is what makes it really fun to plan, create and execute ideas.
Great, now that you mentioned Lunchtime Esports, can you tell us a little bit about that concept? What do you think sets it apart from other esports experiences?
As a Free-to-Play game, powered by blockchain technologies, we’re uniquely positioned to tackle the challenges of the traditional esports ecosystem. In the current landscape, esports is quite gated. It’s catered to the 0.1% of the player-base, and the majority of these players aren’t able to sustain themselves in the ecosystem. It’s also incredibly difficult for most players to devote the time to compete and level-up their skills.
This is why we’re working on introducing a new segment in the industry, called Lunchtime Esports. The goal is to provide a competitive experience to players in short, snackable sessions. Players get to compete at their own pace and convenience while still being able to earn rewards and prizes.
What sets our vision apart from other games is that we’re aiming to create a simple, accessible and continuous competitive experience for players.
Since you mentioned Fableborne being a Free-to-Play and Play-to-Own game, where comes Pixion League into play? Can you tell us a bit about the vision?
Pixion League is the backbone of Lunchtime Esports. In order to build a simple, accessible and continuous esports ecosystem. We need to make it more about skills and not grinding. We don’t want to penalize players that aren’t able to devote as much time as they’d wished. This is why the principles of Lunchtime Esports shine at the core.
We aim to create an ecosystem where players are able to compete and earn rewards based on their skills. Within Pixion League, players will be able to participate in daily, weekly, seasonal and global events. They’ll be able to unlock NFTs, rewards and prizes.
Our goal is to create a sustainable ecosystem that is simple, accessible and continuous for all players.
Can you tell us about any exciting new updates that you and the team are currently working on?
We’re actually right in the midst of testing, optimizing and polishing our upcoming big release. We want as many players as possible to experience Fableborne, which is why we’re currently planning on releasing our Alpha in the first-half of this year.
We’ll also be kick-starting Fableborne’s competitive ecosystem, so I’m excited to see how it shapes up!
What do you like the most at Pixion Games and working in the Fableborne Team?
I love the team and the culture. We have some of the most talented folks in the industry, from companies like Konami, Square Enix, NCSOFT, Riot, Garena, Ubisoft and many more. We’re very diverse, I think 12+ nationalities?
I’ve worked at large-scale publishers, indie studios and smaller teams. But nothing comes close to the culture that we have at Pixion. The team is fantastic, and I’m always learning something new.
The environment and work-life balance is really hard to find, especially in the game industry. Everyone embraces crunch in other studios, but Pixion Games emphasizes on staying away from it. This is rare and something we don’t see in the industry that often, and this is what makes working at Pixion Games such a rewarding experience.
When you are not working on Fableborne, what do you do in your spare time?
In my spare time I’m usually reading a book, it doesn’t have to be something about the games industry or tech, but something as abstract as understanding how commodity trading works, or how Pixar mastered the art of storytelling. I’ll also like to spend time exploring how other businesses work and operate. Mostly, I think, I just have this obsession with learning how things work.
Apart from that, I’m a full time dog and cat dad, so my downtime is always fun!
Can you share any advice for aspiring Product Managers in the gaming industry?
Ship games. Haha, I mean seriously, there’s more to be learned in shipping an indie project than what you could learn anywhere else. It’s important to focus on the fundamentals and learn to understand perspectives from different roles.
How do you keep up with the latest trends in the gaming and web 3 industry to ensure our vision remains competitive?
Web3 in general moves quite fast, there are constant innovations. But that’s what makes it equally rewarding as well. We’re constantly learning, iterating and evolving our ideas. We remain competitive by having the same pace and tenacity.
Last but not least, where can the community connect with you?
I’d say the best place would be Twitter @VasuChaturvedi (where I mostly share insights and rants), I also have an active newsletter where I share my perspective on the esports, web3 and games industry. It’s called 0xPlay :)
And of course make sure to join the Fableborne Discord server where you can find me as @Method#2282!
Thank you for tuning into the first ‘Behind the Scenes’ with our Product Manager, Vasu Chaturvedi. We hope you enjoyed learning more about the people behind Fableborne at Pixion Games. Stay tuned for the next interview!
Make sure to subscribe to the newsletter, join our community on our Discord server, and follow us on Telegram and Twitter to stay up to date with Fableborne!
Let’s embark on an exciting journey together, let’s #becomefableborne.
THE FABLEBORNE TEAM
