Genvid launches a publishing division headed by former Ubisoft producer

Genvid Technologies has started a publishing division and hired former Ubisoft production leader Arthur von Nagel.

Von Nagel will become vice president of production at Genvid Entertainment. He will oversee the Genvid Entertainment product slate and manage its creative and production teams. That means he will work with outside teams that are producing the company’s Massive Interactive Live Events (MILEs), which are a kind of interactive narrative media.

The first example of a MILE was Rival Peak, which Pipeworks made for Genvid with funding and support from Facebook. Rival Peak saw 100 million minutes of viewing in the spring of 2021. Part game, part reality show, Rival Peak let an audience vote on what 12 AI characters would do in an outdoor survival game.

“It’s a really an absolute pleasure to be able to be a part of this and to help grow a team to make these things real,” von Nagel said in an interview with GamesBeat. “I’m, you know, managing a lot of the relationships with our developers and with our IP holders. So my role is doing a lot of people management, a lot of kind of connecting the dots, and team building.”

Genvid’s cloud technology enables the audience to participate in the interactive events that they’re spectating. Jacob Navok, CEO of Genvid, spoke at our recent GamesBeat and Facebook Gaming Summit last week about MILEs and audience-driven games. The latest game is Pac-Man Community, which is an instant game on Facebook. Streamers can share the game with their audiences and audiences can join in by controlling Ghosts chasing down Pac-Man. Genvid has been working on the tech for more than a decade, first at Square Enix and then at Genvid.

“I was both a creative, doing writing like narrative management, and also doing voice direction and casting and then I was also a producer,” von Nagel said. “At Ubisoft, I was a lead producer overseeing their whole Rocksmith brand. And before that, I had a different life where I was running indie record label and putting out all kinds of weird music. It was a fun life.”

Von Nagel’s job is to make more of the MILEs happen. He was previously head production of the Rocksmith music education brand at Ubisoft San Francisco for half a decade and served as a director, creative, and producer at Telltale Games.

“I’m really excited for what we’re doing here at Genvid,” von Nagel said. “Jacob reached out to me when I was at Ubisoft, and he gave me the pitch for what they’re thinking about for the future of MILEs. And it kind of blew my mind. To me, it was seemed like, it was the dream that we had Telltale, to have massive collaborative storytelling.”

He has shipped over 30 titles, including The Walking Dead (2012’s Game of the Year), The Wolf Among Us, Game of Thrones, Tales from the Borderlands, Minecraft: Story Mode, and Batman. Von Nagel’s love of storytelling and people management are key to growing a diverse team pioneering the creation of MILEs — a whole new form of interactive narrative media.

Prior to games, von Nagel was a recording and touring musician, releasing award-winning albums with his progressive death metal band, Cormorant (including 2011’s “Dwellings,” NPR’s Metal Album of the Year). He helped pioneer music crowdfunding before Kickstarter existed, forming an indie record label and inspiring thousands of backer preorders.

Von Nagel has been a longtime DEI and ecology advocate, serving as managing director of a recycling center and a job coach for people with developmental disabilities.

More games will get revealed in time. The team has more than 100 people now, and von Nagel hopes to double it this year.

“What we’re doing is unlike any other kind of game development that I’ve ever worked on in terms of the amount of collaboration between the publisher connecting the dots between the developer and then the tech side of it,” von Nagel said. “They’re collaborating with the designers on the dev side to make sure that the overlay is as responsive and good and understandable as possible. So there’s a lot of communication that has to happen across all those different tech publishing and developer sites. That’s absolutely fascinating to manage.”

Narratives can go in some interesting directions with audience involvement. If one involves vampires and werewolves, the question will be how much of the audience sides with the werewolves or the vampires.

“You have to have empathy for viewpoints that aren’t your own,” von Nagel said.