We all know how it goes. Free-to-play developers first focus on proving retention numbers; often, they prove monetization at the very last moment. Still, the prevailing game development playbook for mobile free-to-play is that retention is crucial and that the focus on monetization comes second.

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.

This is a follow-up piece for “Put your investors to work.” There I talked about the investor update and how founders should utilize their investors.

New podcast: I’m talking with Halli Thor Bjornsson, who is the CEO of Lockwood Publishing, a games company based out of England.

We talk about:
– industry life cycles
– transition from one platform to another
– lots of entrepreneur learnings

The concept of the level 5 leader comes from Jim Collins’ book Good to Great. In this piece, I want to talk about how these leaders operate and how we can apply these lessons to gaming. These are ideas that you can take with you to develop your leadership style and skills, or help others understand their potential.

This recording is from a panel I did last week with Jan Pollack from Wooga, Ross Brockman from Google, and Christian Facey from Audiomob, where we talked about ads in mobile games and how things have been changing in the recent years.

Many people question how much luck is involved in people enjoying success in startups. Supercell became a company worth over $10 billion. Small Giant Games found success with Empires & Puzzles and sold to Zynga for over $800 million. Some might look at my journey with Next Games, doing an IPO and later selling to Netflix, as being lucky.

In this week’s podcast episode, I talking with Asbjoern Malte Soendergaard, the founder and CEO of Tactile Games, who are based out of Copenhagen, Denmark, and are the makers of the hit game Lily’s Garden.

I could have called this post, “if I went back to talk to my 27-year-old self, just setting out to found my first company, what five pieces of advice could I share?”

In this podcast with Andres Constantinidis, founder and CEO of Tinybites, we talk about:
– Learnings from running remote-first game studio for years
– What Andres learned from Playfish?
– How to make games at velocity, but to sustain quality?

Miska from Deconstructor of Fun recently did an interview with Jon Lai, General Partner at VC firm a16z. They’ve just announced a new $600 million gaming fund, to invest in gaming studios, player communities and infrastructure.

In the latest podcast episode, I have Derek Lau (LinkedIn,...

Sent on May 20th, 2022. If you aren’t a subscriber to EGD News, you can subscribe here. I’ve been wondering why there haven’t been any big fundraising announcements from the Finnish games industry for the last twelve months. The apparent reason is that there are...

In this podcast episode, I’m talking with Alexander Bergendahl, who is the co-founder and CEO of LootLocker, a games backend solutions company from Stockholm, Sweden. Alexander is a repeat founder, who’s been doing games companies for a while now. With Alexander, we talk about his founder journey, learnings from doing his companies, and how Alexander is still learning to be a better founder.

Supercell CEO Ilkka Paananen said in an interview in 2021,” We don’t greenlight games. We greenlight teams.”

In another podcast, Paananen elaborated on how he’s seen teams get formed and game concepts being born out of settings that allow for serendipity.

In today’s episode, I’m talking with Neil McFarland and Matthew Ryan from First Light Games, a game studio based in London, UK. The founders started the company a few years ago, to work on free-to-play games for mobile, but last year, decided to pivot to web3 gaming.

I’ve previously written about angel investing and about my angel syndicate.

Here are six lessons I’ve learned from investing in 25 companies in the past three years.

In this podcast episode, I have Adam Jaffe on the show. Adam is the founder and CEO of Mega Studio, a gaming outfit based out of Barcelona, Spain.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this chapter in Jim Collins’ Good to Great, called “First who … then what,” where he talks about having the right people on the bus (bus being the company) before you start driving the bus. When you have the right people on the bus, those people will know where to drive the bus. They’ll want to be on the bus, not because of where the bus is going. But because of who else is on the bus.

In this podcast episode, I talk with Nick Kneuper and Nat Eliason who are building Crypto Raiders, which I believe is one of the best web3 games out there.