In this week’s podcast episode, I’m talking with Ville Heijari, the founder of Original Games, a new mobile games studio with people in St. Petersburg, Helsinki and San Francisco. Ville has been in mobile games ever since his early days at Rovio, when Angry Birds had just been launched. During the last dozen years, he’s accumulated learnings from all sorts of places and has now teamed up with a great team of game developers. In this discussion, we talk about all the learnings from the places Ville has been at and how Original Games is approaching the merge genre with their first game, Merge Inn. And we cover so much more.

I just published my sixth Ask Me Anything podcast episode, where I answer people’s questions related to game studios, fundraising, and all other entrepreneurship-related stuff.

In the situation that you are selling something that no investor is willing to buy, the process will help you get to that realization much quicker than an unstructured investor outreach.

In this week’s podcast episode, I’m talking with Henri Lindgren, who is the CEO of Lightneer, a Helsinki based hyper casual developer. The company Lightneer has gone through lots of changes. The company was founded in 2015 to build and publish educational games, raised a bunch of VC money, but then had to pivot away from educational games. Now the company has done a turnaround and is a thriving hyper casual studio. In this discussion with Henri, we talk about pivots, how the company culture changed through the years of change, and what does hyper casual look like in 2021.

I recently wrote on LinkedIn about the advantages of not working in secrecy. Unfortunately, too many developers act like big companies, being secretive about what they are creating until they have something ready. It’s part of their identity.

Today I’m talking with Matej Lancaric, who is a user acquisition specialist and he runs his own UA consultancy which you can find by going to lancaric.me. In this discussion, we talk about Matej’s perspective on user acquisition for mobile games, how developers are becoming better at building games for UA in mind and what the future holds for game studios embracing user acquisition.

Founders can expect two things from investors: money and value-add. Both are important, but the amount of money available has made money a commodity.

I’m talking with Arnd Benninghoff, who is the Executive Vice President of eSports and Games at MTG. MTG is a Swedish-founded strategic acquirer and operator, who’ve built a portfolio of games businesses that have been acquired through this Swedish family model-approach. In this episode, we talk with Arnd about the way that you can effectively bring world-class game studios together and build something big as a group.

How the Mighty Fall, Jim Collins’ book, talks about companies, once great, failing. Eventually, they become mediocre and finally to capitulation or irrelevance.

This week I released the second episode where I’m talking with Elad Levy, who is the founder and CEO of Dive, who are a new kind of game analytics provider. In the first episode that came out earlier this week, we talked with Elad about embracing data in gaming. Now we’ll focus on being data informed and how game studios should get started with analytics.

When I went into startups in 2005, I was employed as a programmer and getting a monthly salary of about 3,000 euros. I didn’t have many capabilities to save up for rainy days, but I always felt that losing my financial safety was a gamble worth taking. I wanted to do a startup so badly that I could take the risk. The worst that could happen was bankruptcy, and I could at any point start doing programming work again.

I’ve previously talked about killing a game in soft launch, but I wanted to revisit the topic after going back to a blog post from a few years ago from a fellow Finnish game developer.

“We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.” — Seneca.