Today I’m talking with Jon Hook, who is an angel investor and VP of Publishing at Boombit. With Jon, we talk about the current state of mobile gaming, what is happening to hyper-casual and how Jon looks at angel investing in gaming.

I don’t usually write “deconstruct articles” on games, but I wanted to briefly address Brawl Stars since it’s often overlooked as a best-in-class Supercell product. In this article, I’ll break down why I’m bullish about Brawl Stars’ future.

I’ve been happy to see growing game studios embracing the independent teams model. Why? Because the bottoms-up, passion-driven, the gut feeling approach is better than management-driven game initiatives. You empower people with the sense of actual ownership when they can be vision holders and mini-CEOs of the projects that they’ve envisioned.

Ben Cousens in an investor at Lakestar Ventures. He follows the worlds of gaming and crypto very closely and has backed a number of very exciting companies working at the intersection of gaming and crypto. In this episode, we talk about how Ben got excited about crypto, why gaming is a natural place for Bitcoin, and what the future looks like.

The Elite Game Developers podcast had it’s 2-year anniversary on June 4th and I decided to celebrate the anniversary here on the newsletter a bit.

This week I published my second Ask Me Anything podcast episode, where I answer people’s questions related to game studios, fundraising, and all other entrepreneurs related stuff.

This week on the newsletter: Dealing with uncertainty.

I recently read Patrick Lencioni’s latest book from 2020 called The Motive. It’s probably the best CEO leadership book that I’ve ever read. I’ll now try to explain the book’s concept and why it can help new and experienced CEOs figure out their motives for becoming or being a CEO.

In this podcast episode, I’m talking with Jernej Cesen, who is the General Manager and Senior VP of Distribution & BI at Outfit7, the makers of Talking Tom. With Jernej, we talk about being knowledgeable about your market, how you understand the players and the opportunities, and what it’s like to operate with a big gaming IP like Talking Tom.

It’s Joakim here. Greetings from Helsinki! To continue celebrating my podcast’s 2nd anniversary, here’s a list of the most listened to solo episodes, where it’s just me talking about a topic that is of interest to me.

Today I’m talking with Andrew Green, who is the SVP of Operations and Growth at Stillfront Group. Andrew has been in gaming for twenty years, has founded two companies, and has worked for other gaming companies including Take-Two, EA, and TinyCo. He then did a two-year stint at Andreessen Horowitz, before then joining Stillfront. We’ll now talk with Andrew about his journey in gaming and startups and what lessons he’s learned.

In this week’s newsletter, I’m focusing on highlights from two recent podcast episodes that I really liked. I spent most of the week writing two bigger pieces that will come out during this summer on game development, so look out for those.

I’m talking with Eric Goldberg, who is an investor and an entrepreneur in gaming, and he has been in the industry for close to 35 years now. Eric runs an investment company called Crossover Technologies. And he’s now a co-founder with Raph Koster in Playable Worlds. In this episode, we’re going to be talking about Eric’s background, his knowledge of gaming funding, but also about some of these billion dollar game companies, how they’ve been growing in the recent years, and what has been changing there to allow these companies to come up.

I want to expand more on how you can identify the reward-centered leader in yourself and what you can do about it. In Lencioni’s book, he talks about the activities that reward-centered leaders aren’t doing. Mainly because they don’t enjoy the work that needs to be put into these areas.

Once you get over the risk-aversion of jumping into the unknown of a startup, you start to see that it’s not all that bad. And you’re learning a lot. You learn about all the aspects of building a company. You learn about putting together a team and how the team can work together to make games. You get to learn about financing the whole operation, which is an exciting and complex world of its own.

The long-asked non-disclosure agreement template for Elite Game Developers is finally here. I first releasing the one-sided NDA template and we will come back to mutual NDA at a later point.

I recently Tweeted that “There’s not enough full-time angel investors in gaming,” which is totally true. In Europe, I only know of a handful of angel investors focused on gaming, and even out of those, only a couple do it full-time.

When I was building games companies, I always felt our team meetings could easily be derailed in several ways.

I’ve got Ethan Levy back on the podcast and he wanted to ask me about startup valuations, what’s all the terminology around the topic, how to prepare for a fundraise with a valuation in mind, and how investors and founders can think about the right valuation for a startup.