I hosted a webinar with Erik Bryant from Opera Event and Steven Chard Luna Labs. Both companies are at the forefront of innovative mobile game ads, and I wanted to explore several topics on how game developers can utilize game creatives to win players over.

In this episode, I have a chat with Hakan Ulvan, the co-founder and CEO of Bigger Games from Istanbul, Turkey. Hakan and his co-founders left Peak Games a few years ago to start working on their own game studio. In this episode, we talk about their approach to making games, how the Turkish gaming ecosystem has evolved over the years, and what will happen next.

The biggest joy in my work is to work with founders at any stage of their careers as entrepreneurs. The second big joy for me is writing EGD news, being as honest as possible. It’s time to promote some great newsletters that I subscribe to.

This is part 2 of my discussion with Javier Barnes, Product Manager at Tilting Point. Javier has an extensive career in gaming, having worked at Gameloft, Social Point, and others. With Javier, we decided to make this episode a discussion around the topic of game design in 2021, as it’s of big interest for both of us. We talk about playtesting, player motivations, user-oriented design, the model of small teams, and more.

Today I’m talking with Javier Barnes, Product Manager at Tilting Point. Javier has an extensive career in gaming, having worked at Gameloft, Social Point and others. With Javier, we decided to make this episode a more of a discussion, around the topic of game design in 2021, as it’s of big interest for both of us. We talk about playtesting, player motivations, user oriented design, the model of small teams, and more.

The quarantine has ended, and we are free again! This week was busy still, as we closed the 2nd investment that my angel syndicate has made. I’m learning a lot about the process, and angel syndicates are the way of investing that feels like the right model for me.

In 2019, I started helping the founders of games companies. Founders often spend an enormous amount of time raising money, and optimizing who is involved in a financing round. However, too few founders tap into their investors sufficiently. One fundamental way to keep possible investors and existing investors involved and excited about the company is to send out a monthly update.

In this episode, I talking with Phil Sanderson, the Managing Partner at Griffin Gaming Partners, a venture capital firm that focuses on investing across the broad gaming ecosystem.

The first game project for a new game studio usually starts from an idea that the founders had when they started the company. It was in the pitch deck they showed to investors. It was the game that got people excited to join the company.

On January 28th, I did a webinar on the topic of how to create a game studio pitch deck. In this webinar, I shared all that I know about what pitch decks should communicate. Watch the recording and grab the presentation.

Rapid prototyping and soft launching are obvious already. Listening to a founder pitch me a game, I always want to understand how they view the market and why the gaming audience needs their game?

I wanted to write about my new role at Play Ventures, where I just today started as Venture Partner. Besides my work on Elite Game Developers, I’ve been getting into investing in gaming studios. I feel that this is an excellent step for me in my career of exploring the investment side of the industry. Let me explain what this role is all about and how it will affect things going forward.

This is a recording from a webinar that I did with Anton Gorodetsky and Sergei Evdokimov from InvestGame.net and we reviewed gaming’s investment, M&A, and IPO landscape from 2020 and shared our predictions on what will happen in gaming during 2021.

I recently did a poll on LinkedIn. There I asked “For parents who work in the games industry: how many hours a day do you allow your kids to play video games?”

On January 28th, I did a webinar on the topic of how to create a game studio pitch deck. In this webinar, I shared all that I know about what pitch decks should communicate. Watch the recording and grab the presentation.

In this episode, I have a chat with Anton Gauffin, the founder and CEO of Huuuge Games. Anton has been an entrepreneur in gaming for two decades now and has seen pretty much everything, all the ups, and downs.

I named my first book “The Long Term Game,” but I could have as well called it “The Asymmetric Opportunity.”

In this episode, I’m talking with Herdjie Zhou, the Co-Founder and CEO of Lucky Kat Games, a hyper-casual gaming studio from the Netherlands. Herdjie started Lucky Kat with his brother in 2015 and they’ve gone through an amazing journey at building a gaming studio, totally bootstrapped.

My prediction for M&A is that the momentum for consolidation will start moving over from profitable target companies down to the Series A stage. Public companies will offer highly attractive multipliers and public company stock for startups who’ve shown product-market fit — companies who haven’t yet scaled but will do so in the next 12 months.

This is a webinar we did with Anton Gorodetsky and Sergei Evdokimov from InvestGame.net and we reviewed gaming’s investment, M&A, and IPO landscape from 2020 and shared our predictions on what will happen in gaming during 2021.