Warframe Interview: Drew Pennycook and Corey Van Den Hoogenband return a year after Android launch for another talk

If you saw this year's TennoCon, then you know we have so much to be excited about. Brysko, especially. But we are also one year on from Warframe's Android launch, one that has been fairly successful. I caught up with Drew Pennycook and Corey Van Den Hoogenband a year after our first discussion, to see how Warframe's mobile team have fared.

Please could you introduce yourselves?

Corey Van Den Hoogenven:  I'm Corey Van Den Hoogenven. I'm a community project manager on Warframe. I've been with DE (Digital Extremes) for just under six years.

Drew Pennycook: I'm Drew, Drew Pennycook, the mobile producer. I've been with Digital Extremes for almost 13 years now.

What did you do before mobile, Drew?

Drew: I was on the community side. I went from there, and then I was doing more editor-based production work. And then started heading up mobile. I was brought on originally for the PS4.

Corey, I believe you have been in the community from the start?

Corey: Yeah, I'm still under the community umbrella, but I have some project management background. My title's kind of funny. I'm applying project management principles to community tasks like Quest to Conquer Cancer, TennoCon and all of our various charity initiatives. Things that need project management that are outside of the core game. I work on a lot of that stuff, yeah.

You mentioned TennoCon. How's it been for both of you so far getting everything ready? I imagine you're going to be playing a bigger role in it, with Megan Everett stepping up for Rebecca Ford

Corey: You know, we were having a community team meeting yesterday, and this term came up of a quiet confidence this year because we're so familiar and there's a lot of trust now with the devs and the event staff and ourselves even. So we've done very similar events. Every year is different. But when Megan said that, I felt it in my bones. I thought, yeah, there is a kind of quiet confidence.

We're excited. We know how this thing goes. And we have the best audience. It's like we're not playing to hecklers or anything. The people who are here are excited for Warframe, and so are we.

Drew: For me, this is probably actually the quietest year I've had in a long time, which is nice because last year we had a big Android push. Now that that's out the door, we're just trying to keep things smooth and steady. So I get to kind of relax and enjoy more than usual, which is good. 

Corey: Last year, we had the Android demo station. But this year, Android is global. It's out.

Drew: Yep. We just get to be part of the crowd now, which is good.

What projects have you been working on since the Android push has gone? Because that was the big one for mobile, wasn't it?

Drew: There's still a lot of work to do there, even with iOS, which has been out for a few years now, and Android, which has got the better part of a year under its belt now. There's still a lot that we want to do and that we will do. It's focusing on those optimisations, those improvements. 

A lot of Corey's work revolves around getting player feedback and making sure that we're following what the players want, trying to implement those changes and dealing with any issues as they come up. It'll be ongoing indefinitely at this point.

Corey:  Yeah, although I mentioned the Quest to Conquer Cancer and the TennoCon, I do work pretty much daily on mobile as well with Drew. We're talking constantly about updates and hotfixes, and “this strange report came in” from the players on the forums and on Discord and figuring out what we can do there.

Drew:  And then, of course, every year there's new hardware that comes out too. Looking forward to the fall, it's like, okay, there's going to be new iPhones, new Android phones. What are they going to do? What crazy new features will they have? So all that keeps us busy.

How do you approach the balance between outdated hardware and these new, more powerful phones?

Drew: The new ones tend to be less of a concern, even though there can be issues depending on if they change the GPU and things like that. But they tend to be less of a concern because the more power we get, the easier it is for us.

Having that gradual increase every year is a little bit of a relief in terms of performance and optimisation. Of course, we want to always be looking back at what the majority of the players are using. What are they using on a daily basis, and where are they running into the most issues?

Especially with Android now. There's a lot of juggling because there are so many devices, and trying to figure out whether we prioritise the low-end devices we know have issues, but it might not be that popular of a device. And there are other ones that are more popular, and we try to aim towards the ones that we know have the largest impact. So that's where we try to put our energy.

Corey: The good news is that with Warframe, be it PC, PlayStation or mobile, there's always been a company-wide initiative to accommodate lower-end PCs, and we have really fabulous performance staff whose job is to make sure this game runs as well as it can on lower-end devices. Mobile certainly benefits from the fact that we're always considering lower-end devices.

Drew: Especially right now, it's odd times with chip shortages, and it's tough. Even myself, I'm personally struggling to upgrade devices. So I think, okay, let's try to squeeze every last drop we can out of our existing devices and try to make them run as long as we can.

Corey: At the beginning of this year, on a dev stream, Steve had kind of mentioned that it was an initiative for the year. It was taking a look back and really focusing on performance. Again, that's just awesome because a lot of people right now want that. They want to stick to their devices, which is great. We want to take care of them, and we're able to. 

Have you had any big issues with the Android launch?

Drew: I wish I could say bug-free. We learned a lot from our iOS launch that applied to our Android launch, thankfully. So there's a lot of mistakes that we made back then that we didn't repeat, which has been really nice. I'd say we had a much smoother launch, despite the fact that there are so many devices to consider. 

One issue that's just a constant issue for us to consider is just low RAM phones. Phones that just don't have the power to kind of run at a respectable performance rate. I don't know if I'd call that a bug so much as just a constant struggle. Just a challenge.

Corey: We always try to emphasise, it's not Warframe mobile. It is Warframe on mobile. It's the full experience. That does become tricky. It's just the sheer number of devices. Because on iOS, we could say what iPhone are you on, and there's like six or so. But with Android, it's 4,000-plus devices that could be used.

So someone may have a game-breaking bug on their device, but someone else says, 'No, I didn't experience that.' It can be very tricky to track that down. Shout out to Quality Assurance, amazing QA team. We're constantly reproducing the bugs in-house and stuff. But it is really hard to track some of these reports.

Drew: There are some devices that we can't even get in Canada, such as Xiaomi. Those can be very difficult for us to track down. There'll be times when we'll get a report from a player that says I'm having an issue with this specific device. So it becomes a question of, 'Can we get that device? Can we even get it into the studio?' And so there's kind of a hunt that has to occur to try to even get some of these.

Corey: I'm really proud of our hotfix cadence, though. We've been able to get a lot of fixes out the door with minimal wait times. Not always. Sometimes we have to go dark when there's a big update on the way, like Jade Shadow's Constellations. But I'm really impressed when I watch the mobile team just constantly delivering updates, sometimes twice a week.

Drew: One of the huge benefits of working on mobile is the speed. Probably second only to PC in terms of just our ability to push updates out. The review process is very quick compared to PlayStation or Xbox. Or Nintendo especially. On mobile, we have the luxury of being able to say, let's get this into players' hands last minute if we can. 

What's the general reception been to the Android launch from the community?

Corey: I think it's generally quite positive. I found this to be an interesting kind of statement, more on social media. Depending on which platform you find yourself in, it's like existing in different realities. I'll land on the Warframe subreddit, and people will be saying I can't believe this game runs as well as it does. This is unbelievable. Then I show up on the Warframe Discord, and it's a little bit more measured, and they're asking when we're going to fix this or that issue.

It's like you kind of pop into different parallel dimensions in terms of, are we doing great? Maybe we're not. I'm not sure. You have to figure out, based on a balance or a bell curve, where we're sitting. But I think overall it's quite positive and we're just fixing all the time. We're getting there.

Drew: I'd say our reviews tend to tell a fairly positive story. Internally, we definitely focus more on the negatives because that's where we know we need to do the work. Corey does come in with good news a lot, but the bad news always gets way more attention.

Corey: Yeah, I will come in with one positive bit of feedback just so everybody knows we're doing cool things here. And then I'll say, having said that, I did find these three notes today, and then we'll figure that stuff out. One of my favourite things to hear is when players say, 'I used to play this on my PS4 or my Xbox One, and I don't have access to that console anymore, but I just picked up where I left off with the cross-platform save.'

And they're doing that on iOS or on Android. That's really cool to me. Some people use it just for their dailies, and that's great. But other people are saying, no, this is now my Warframe experience.

Speaking on cross-platform, have you noticed many people migrating to purely mobile?

Drew:  I don't know the exact split. But I can say that we found that there are markets that are dominated by mobile. By Android specifically. It tends to just be the platform of choice. So we've seen an uptick in players there in those regions, which has been really cool. 

We see our North American players and the like who also enjoy playing on their phones. But in regions where phones dominate, we've seen upticks there. That was one of our goals; we wanted to reach those markets where they might not have easy access to consoles, or that just might not be the way they choose to play.

With the launch of Android, there might be a big influx of players. Looking back, Final Fantasy XIV had massive server issues with the World of Warcraft exodus. Have there been any conversations about how to prepare the infrastructure for an event like this?

Drew: I wouldn't say so. Our servers can handle a lot, so I don't think that would be a fear because it would have to be something very dramatic. We've been doing this for such a long time that there wouldn't be any concerns or anything like that.

Corey: I can tell you, with the launch of Jade Shadows Constellations, there were a lot of players. We've just been doing so much great stuff with new voice actors, and they're bringing their fandoms to Warframe for the first time. So that's possibly contributing.

We have seen massive properties like The Lord of the Rings or Final Fantasy try and fail to crack the mobile market. What do you think a comparatively smaller franchise like Warframe has over them that lets it succeed here?

Drew: All I can speak to is the things that we prioritise and the things that we value. A lot of that comes down to the work that Corey does, which is community-based. Trying to focus on what it is that our community enjoys best, serving them in the ways that they want, and then giving them that genuine one-to-one experience, whether it's on PC, iOS or Android.

Let’s talk more about the community. What have you enjoyed most about this year's TennoCon?

Corey: I, selfishly, was very excited for players to see the narrative panel. I hosted that one this year, so that was my selfish bias. It was a great panel. Last year was the first time we did it, and I think it went really well. 

The writers have such great chemistry, and we have a few voice actors this year. It really was just a bunch of theatre kids on stage just being goofballs, but also providing a lot of really interesting insight. And TennoConcert was just outrageous. 

Last year was really special, and it was new, and it was experimental. This year, they said, 'What if that, but more?'  I think there is always that meme of  DE is a music studio that just happens to make games. We really took that to heart this year and said, 'Oh, you think we're a music studio, huh? We'll show you.'

Drew: For me, it was any tidbits I could get about Tao. Tao is something that's been talked about in the Warframe spheres for at least 10 years now. Any bits that I can hear about our plans with Tao are always exciting for me.

Corey: Last year, that was the one thing I was not allowed to say on the narrative panel. In the game, we've said Tao is in sight. That's a line that Albrecht Entrati said at the end of 1999. DE said. 'Don't say it, because we were doing the Old Peace half an hour after the narrative panel.' But this year, I can say it all I want. Tao is in sight.

Do you have a favourite interaction during TennoCon, or just any community event?

Drew: Mine might be similar to Corey's, actually. It was working with Make-A-Wish. Definitely the most standout by far. Being able to give them that moment and do all the fun activities with them. That was huge. 

Corey: Yeah, mine would be the 2024 edition of that Make-A-Wish, because we had this amazing kid, James. He’s actually just graduated from High School. He wanted to be a voice actor, so we created a character for him.

It was me, Reb and Ronnie who wrote this character. Then James came to London, Ontario, and recorded his lines that week. I think it was Thursday. Then we got his audio into the game for Saturday to debut it at TennoCon. He was in the front row with me, and the crowd was chanting “James, James, James”. It was really special. 

And then the fans came up afterwards and were asking for autographs and stuff like that. Seeing that even the fans, the Tenno, wanted to meet James. He was a new member of the Warframe cast. I'm going to remember that for the rest of my life. 

If you could say anything to the community, what would it be?

Corey: I would say we're here as long as you're here.

Drew: Out of all the years and all the things that we've come up with, the good, the bad, everything in between, we're not out of ideas. We still have lots left to do and lots of stories left to tell.