While working on the ebook, I reached out to several VCs I know of and asked them why they passed on investments. Reasons that feel obvious to VCs but maybe not to founders. Here’s a list of the ones that VCs feel are obvious but might not be understood well enough by founders.

It was early 2013. I had left Supercell and was putting together the founding team for Next Games. At the same time, I’d been asked by the city of Oulu to have lectures on free-to-play game development for local developers.

Here are my predictions for gaming startups in the new year.

Listen to the highlights of the best podcast episodes of 2022, with transcripts available of the highlights.

As more and more game developers are choosing to start their own games companies, it’s essential to consider whether this is the right decision for everyone. While entrepreneurship can be a rewarding and fulfilling experience, it shouldn’t be undertaken lightly.

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 unique attributes that can be utilized across multiple games.

A startup raises funding to go to the next level. At the same time, the founders must also go to the next level. They need to hire more people, raise financing, and lead a bigger company.

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 the 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 the middle of the day, I would put on my shoes and go out walking. Usually, I’d already done an hour of writing and would feel that I needed to get away from my computer.

Today I’m talking with Maor Sadra, the co-founder and CEO of INCRMNTAL, which is a company that evolves digital marketing from the measurement of traffic to measuring value.

I recently read Mindset by Carol Dweck. The book talks about the growth mindset, where individuals thrive on learning. Not only from observations in life, reading books, and studying, but from challenging situations and using failure as the means to develop.

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 journey on social media and also on his podcasts.

I remember a founder interaction from a few years ago. The company had just raised a pre-seed of 300K, and immediately, the founders were planning to take the whole team to GDC. They were so happy to go there. Since this was early 2020, GDC got canceled because of COVID. These founders needed to focus on the startup reality instead of going to GDC.

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.

“This is the hardest thing game in all to know, like when you should be pushing forward and when you should go back and do something else. Like making that call is the hardest and sometimes it needs the guts that you just trusted, Hey, this is what we are doing. It’s gonna be great. It’s not great yet, but if you push forward, it will be great. And at the same time, sometimes you just waste a lot of time if you push forward and, and you are, you don’t actually have anything there. Understanding where, what, where you are and what you should do. I think that is the hardest call to make.”

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.