Elite Game Developers Podcast

In this podcast episode from June 2023, I talk with David Kaye, who did his first games company in the 1990s. Recently, he sold his company to Embracer and is now embarking on a journey to invest in gaming founders.

This time, Pavel Afanasiev from Northern Lights Entertainment pitches his games company to me, and I share feedback. Pavel decided not to do slides, so it's a different format with pros and cons.

This is a repost from a few years back and it's definitely one of my favorite episodes of all time. Kristian Segerstrale is the CEO Super Evil Megacorp, a games company based out of San Francisco. Kristian is a legend in gaming. He started his first games company Macrospace twenty years ago, which IPOed as Glu Mobile a few year later. Later he sold his second company Playfish to EA in 2009. We talk about being an entrepreneur in gaming, and how Kristian’s beliefs have evolved over the years, in what it takes to succeed in gaming.

This is a new episode series where a founder pitches their company to Joakim, and then Joakim shares feedback on the pitch. The first one is with Melissa McBride from Sophia Technologies. They are using gaming and play to revolutionize education and build a digital campus where every child has access to game-based learning technology powered by VR and AI technologies.

This is a repost of an older episode I recorded some time ago on building a team in gaming. I started my first company alone as a solo founder, which was the biggest mistake I had ever made. In this episode, I talk about why you should always focus on team building when considering a startup. Here is the original description of this episode: In April 2020, I did a webinar on the topic of Teams and team building in gaming. I went through how you'd start off building a founding team, and I cover the example of myself putting together my founding team back in 2012. Then I'll talk about the dream team in gaming, what that means, and how new founders should think about hiring to build the best team that builds the best games.

With 15 years in the games industry, Arseny Lebedev is the co-founder and CEO at Original Games (makers of Merge Inn) where he focuses on product and strategy. In this episode, we discuss building games, managing stress, and why some people are geared toward entrepreneurship.

My book, "Long Term Game: How to Build a Video Games Company," came out in March 2020. It was also released as an audiobook version, which you can find on Audible and other major online audiobook stores. I want to share with you the first chapter of the book. I hope you enjoy this read from Keith O’Brien. Get the book from here. Note that this episode is a repost from 2020.

Here are the Elite Game Developers podcast highlights from 2022. This year, 36 podcast episodes went live, and I spoke to founders and investors from all over the globe, who all are working to build great gaming companies. Now, I want to end this year with my favorite highlights. The transcript is available here.

Cyril Barrow is the co-founder and COO of Village Studio, a new kind of games company that is building cross-game avatars that act as portable avatars dressed in NFT wearables with unique attributes that can be utilized across multiple games. Cyril has been in the games industry for a long time. He has had leadership roles at companies like Digital Chocolate, Rovio, and EA, most recently leading the EA Helsinki studio. In this episode, we talk about Cyril's lessons learned from working in leadership, building studios, and what he sees as the true potential of interoperability of assets between games.

Kelly Wallick has worked in the tech and video game industry for over ten years. She’s the founder of the Indie MEGABOOTH and is now a Partner at 1Up Ventures. She has also been the longest-sitting Chair of the Independent Games Festival and the first woman to hold the title. In addition, Kelly is proud to serve on the GLAAD Media Award Advisory Board. Kelly is a passionate believer in the strength and impact of community and implementing long-term change to support creative, unique, and diverse voices. in our discussion, we talk about investing in gaming, and then we talk about 1Up's founder community and how that community is adding value to the founders.

Today I'm talking with Maor Sadra, the co-founder and CEO of INCRMNTAL, which is a company that evolves digital marketing from measuring traffic to measuring value. In this episode, we talk about how Maor's company changes the daily life of online marketers, including UA professionals in gaming. Then we cover Maor's background, how he approaches entrepreneurship and what lessons he's picked up along the way.

Tom Hammond is the co-founder and CEO of Userwise, a company that is shaping up live-ops in gaming, and they call themselves the world’s first player experience management platform trusted by teams to power their Liveops all-in-one place. Tom is an entrepreneur who shares a lot about his founder's journey on social media and also on his podcast, Mastering Retention. In this episode with Tom, we talk about bootstrapping a company versus the venture-backed path. How small game studios, with not a lot of cash or experience, can still break out. And what Tom thinks is the reason that developers don't build games with live ops from day one

This week on the podcast, I'm talking with Jenny Xu, the co-founder and CEO of Talofa Games, a fitness games company based out of California. Jenny is a first-time founder with an impressive background from working on games as a teenager, getting millions of downloads, then spending time at Google, EA, and N3TWORK, and then starting her own venture-backed gaming startup. In this discussion, we talk about Jenny's journey, how she got into gaming, learning to work in teams and manage teams, and what she's learned from being a CEO.

In today's episode, I'm interviewing a friend of mine, my ex-colleague Touko Tahkokallio, who was the designer on games like Hay Day, and Boom Beach and led the Brawl Stars team at Supercell. And he's now doing his own studio in Helsinki with a group of experienced game developers. In this discussion with Touko, we talk about his learnings from creating both board games and video games and how he sees teams or pairs of excellent individuals working together to create these games.

David Amor is the co-founder and CEO of Playmint, a new kind of games company building games for web3. David has had a long career in gaming, from EA in the early nineties to having started several gaming startups, including Delinquent, which got sold to MAG Interactive some years ago. In this discussion with David, we talk about the lessons he’s learned from his previous gaming startups, what are the commonalities of successful gaming founders and why David decided to start a new games company, doing Web3.

After visiting the Building Better Games podcast, I invited the podcast hosts, Aaron Smith, and Ben Carcich, to my podcast. The guys run a leadership consultancy called Valarin, and both Aaron and Ben have an extensive experience from management positions at companies like Riot Games. Besides leadership, we talk about a lot of topics that relate to company building, like product vision, holding off from starting game projects too quickly without proper planning, and what has been the thing that has enabled so many ex-Riot people to start great gaming companies.

In this podcast episode, I'm speaking with Jon Radoff, the founder and CEO of Beamable, a company that enables game developers to launch live service games. Jon has been in gaming for ages and has founded several startups in the gaming space. In this discussion, we talk about what Jon learned about company building from his previous company Disruptor Beam, what he thinks is happening with all the buzzwords in gaming, like the metaverse, and where that is leading the industry. To share one quote from Jon, it would be this one: "The thing the game industry will teach you is humility. And if you don't have humility, when you start building games, you will eventually have humility because it's only a matter of time. Before you find out that your, your brilliant idea, your beautiful idea, just doesn't resonate with a large enough audience to become commercially viable because you look at the intersection points of success in this industry." And there's so much more. Here's my discussion with Jon Radoff.

I invited Sophie Vo to my podcast. Sophie has an extensive background in gaming, and she's most recently been managing the Voodoo Berlin studio. You might have also been listening to her podcast Rise & Play, where she talks with guests about leadership in gaming. With Sophie, we talk about the topics of giving feedback and receiving feedback. I’ve seen a lot of startups where the co-founders don’t really talk about issues, and then it comes to the point where someone needs to leave. I believe we can all better communicate our expectations and issues and share feedback with the people we work with.

This is the ninth Ask Me Anything episode, where I answer questions on how I look at investing. I had a session with a team from one VC firm and they were asking me questions. And then I also picked up another interesting question about angel investing. If you have questions you'd like me to ask, you can go here to submit them. As I mention in the episode, I'm gonna take a break for July and August on the podcast, and we'll be back in early September with new episodes.

In this week's podcast episode, I'm talking with Halli Thor Bjornsson, who is the CEO of Lockwood Publishing, a games company based out of England. In this discussion with Halli, we talk about the industry life cycles in gaming, how console and PC transitioning to mobile is very similar to now as many folks are moving to web3, and we spend some time talking about our experiences as entrepreneurs.