EGD News #10 (Jan 3rd 2020)

It’s Joakim here. Happy new year 2020 everybody! Today we are reflecting on what happened in 2019. Elite Game Developers was launched in June and during the seven months of our lifetime, we’ve brought out 40 podcast episodes and almost a dozen blog articles on founding and building successful games companies. 😊

Top 3 podcast episodes of 2019

​Stella Wang in episode 1 – Stella is great and an inspiration for gaming entrepreneurs. In this episode, we talked about her journey into gaming and founding Dazzle Rocks. We also talk about her approach to developing your team, to unleash they’re hidden powers.

​Lasse Seppänen in episode 9 – Lasse was the former CEO of Playraven, a company that he and his co-founders started in 2013. The company doesn’t exist anymore and in this episode, we cover the aspects that went into finding a good ending the company.

​Adam Schaub in episode 35 – Adam is the co-founder and CEO of Strange Quest. We talked about all the aspects that he sees that matter for a gaming startup to get off to a good start. How do you prepare? What should happen in the early stages? What ways of working can you bring from big companies to a small company?

Top 3 articles of 2019

​A new life in startup land – I wrote this article last March, on my last day at Next Games. I was embarking on a change in my life, which eventually lead to founding Elite Game Developers in June.

​”Start with Why” for gaming entrepreneurs – My friend Laurent Notin exposed me to “Start With Why” during this summer and I’ve been fascinated with the book. The way it can help gaming founders create new companies is beyond words. Hope you have time to read my summary and how to apply it to gaming companies.

​How to be an angel investor in the games industry – In November, I wrote an article about my activity as an angel investor in gaming. I wanted to highlight all the things that I look at in the gaming company. It’s not the game that I’m interested in, it is the whole company and the mission of the founders that matters.

Our Latest Podcasts

​Understand your game through playt<esting — My first interaction with PlaytestCloud was in 2015, when I heard Antti Hattara, then at Wooga, describing this playtesting service he was advising. You just upload the build and you’ll soon get some videos of people playing your game.

In this episode, I’m talking with co-founder and CEO Christian Ress and we talk about the founding story of PlaytestCloud. We also cover how they’ve experienced being part of the Games User Research movement, were more developers are embracing these qualitative measures, and not only the game metrics that come after launching the game.

All past episodes can be found here.

A Book Recommendation

​Late Bloomers (Rich Karlgaard) — I really liked the concept of this book. I’ve always obsessed with early achievement and that I feel bad for not starting my startup until I was 27 years old. This book highlights that it was just at the right time, and in many ways, I was a lot earlier than most of the late bloomers.

In the book, there’s a realization from the author, a late bloomer himself: He’s more driven by curiosity, exploration, discovery – and less by goals, competition, and winning.