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.

I started going through the top content that was consumed on EGD during Q1 of 2021. Here’s the top 10.

I recently sat down with Miska Katkoff and Sophie Vo to talk about a book that I really enjoyed and often recommend called The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, by Patrick M. Lencioni. It’s a management fable about a team’s struggles to work as a team, and how they used Lencioni’s five behaviors model to become an exceptional and effective team.

Developers often implement daily login rewards to incentivize players to return on a daily basis. Some games build up task lists that populate with new unique tasks every morning. Do these five tasks to open the golden crate.

Today I’m talking with Salla Niemelä, who is responsible for Employee Experience at FuturePlay, a mobile game studio in Helsinki. With Salla, we talk about how game studios approach the employee and employer relationship, throughout the full lifecycle of the employment, from hiring, to working and developing the relationship and finally to an exit.

Besides the extrinsic “getting wealthy” motivation, I feel that there are always two intrinsic motivations for people to start companies.

This week I launched our Shareholders’ Agreement template, which is now available as a template on the Elite Game Developers website. A typical abbreviation for the agreement is an SHA, and I’ll use it from now on.

Sent on April 30th 2021. If you aren’t a subscriber to EGD News, you can subscribe here. It's Joakim here. Greetings from Helsinki! I've created so much content on the Elite Game Developers website that it often becomes hard to directly go to a particular piece...

In today’s episode, I’m going to be addressing some Ask Me Anything questions that I’ve been asking for on the Elite Game Developers newsletter.

“An antifragile team grows stronger from outside problems, hurdles, and attacks.” The reason to have an antifragile team is that making games is so hard.

Today I’m talking with Anat Shperling, the co-founder and CEO of Toya, a Roblox game studio based out of Israel. Anat and her team started building games for UGC platforms in 2016, first on Minecraft, before moving fully over to Roblox. Anat’s company Toya is a female-led studio developing digital games and media to empower a growing female user base.

I wanted to revisit the product strategy article from 2020. Several startups, which I’ve been talking to when they have a game out that is working, start contemplating on setting up a second games team to work on a new title.

I recently did a webinar with Collin Foss, the Co-Founder and CPO of Skunkworks, a Helsinki-based mobile games startup and makers of the wildly popular MergeFriends. With Collin, we talked about how the casual merge category has recently been blowing up with more and more developers moving over, and what makes these games differentiate from each other.

The Elite Game Developers website has been exploding with visitors in recent weeks. Here’s what the weekly visits look like.

I did a webinar with Collin Foss, the Co-Founder and CPO of Skunkworks, a Helsinki-based mobile games startup and makers of the wildly popular MergeFriends. If you didn’t manage to attend our webinar, the recording and Collin’s presentation have been uploaded to the EGD website.

You’ve spent the last six months putting together your founding team, raising money for a startup, and then you start truly working on your product. You know about company values. You understand that a mission and vision are essential. But how would you proceed to get things going? Too often, the easy thing is to start making the game, and the hard thing is to stop and think about how to be good at culture.

In this episode, I talk with Celia Hodent, game user experience expert and former Director of UX at Epic Games. We talk about adapting the game UX mindset, breaking down how players learn and retain information, and how players are motivated to return to the games that they are playing.

The a16z folks recently interviewed Supercell CEO Ilkka Paananen in their Clubhouse room. Below is a link to the recording of that conversation.

I recently invited Ethan Levy from N3twork back on the show, to talk about an interesting concept called the “Tower of Want”. The concept of “Tower of Want” is something that Ethan created some six years ago, to help free-to-play game designers to create long-term goals, through understanding the short-term and long-term loops and player motivations that would drive a successful free-to-play game.