EGD News #23

Hi there,

Greetings from Helsinki from my home office, where I’ll be working from for the entirety of the quarantine. A daily routine is starting to form where I wake up, homeschool the kids, work, eat, get back to work, do chores, do a workout, and read before going to sleep.

Three weeks with the family isn’t anything new. We make trips away from Helsinki, to the countryside in the summer and stay there for several weeks. But there you have people at the beaches, at movie theaters, at public playgrounds, parks with people crowded to play Pokemon Go.

I’m a remote-native. I’ve been working from home for over a year now, but I do want to see people. Have the reality moments, the face to face interactions, with all of the gestures that our bodies use as signals. I miss the hugs from ex-colleagues and friends after a coffee meeting. I wonder if lots of remote-natives will take their work outside of their homes once this is over.

Thanks for all the feedback that everyone has sent to me about the Games startup funding during a pandemic article that I wrote last week. I will be coming back to the topic in a month when we have more information on how investors and startups have been dealing with the reshuffle caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Blog

​Cap table modeling — I wrote an article about cap table modeling. For beginners, a cap table is a document that shows who owns how much of the company. It’s a breakdown of shareholders. In this article, I point out to founders how they should start modeling and protecting their cap tables.

With modeling, you can predict how much ownership each founder will have once you complete a funding round. And then, you can model out the future rounds that will happen after the first round. You got your pre-seed, seed and Series A, which all dilute the ownership of the founders. You can use the template as a tool to understand and diligently protect your share of the company. You’ll start to realize that by spending less to achieve more, you’ll own more of the company later on.

Get the template from here.

Podcast

​How To Develop Games Differently — Simon Hill is the General Manager of Voodoo London. Simon was the co-founder and CEO of Gumbug, a London based mobile gaming startup that just recently merged with Voodoo to form the London offices. In this podcast episode, we talk with Simon about the way that he’s seen product development evolve in gaming in the past fifteen years, all the way from Flash games portals to hyper-casual mobile games.

Topics that we cover include:

• When you founded Gumbug, where did you want to put your effort into, to do things differently than other developers?
• You’re an entrepreneur who’s managed to take their company under the wings of a bigger one. What did you learn from that process?
• Why do you think the best companies in hyper-casual are UA companies?
• What are the opportunities for personal development at a company like Voodoo?
• What is an optimal green-light process for a game concept to go into development?

Fundraising webinar recorded

We had a webinar this Monday called Inside the Gaming VCs Brain, and I think I’m getting the hang of this medium. I went through the things that I believe are going through every gaming VCs brain when they are listening to a founder.

​Here is the recording.

We’re planning on doing another webinar at the end of April. In the meantime, Elite Game Developers is helping founders with their investor pitch. Check out the Pitch your games company online course here.

The recording is also available on the Elite Game Developers YouTube channel. To access the channel, click here.

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Articles Worth Reading

+ Don’t forget that time is a resource — Jeff Witt writes about how mobile games developers often forget that time is the ultimate resource. People play these games in short sessions, and optimizing the time to progress by selling time-related items is a must-have.

+ Advertising Strategy During a Recession — Eric Seufert did an excellent webinar this week on what is happening to the advertising spend and strategies during a recession like the one that COVID-19 is causing. What the economic outlook is like for the recession that is now coming, how you can protect your marketing activities and UA campaigns from the impact, and how you take advantage of the situation. Check out this recording to learn more.

​+ From remote work to the remote studio — Loads of developers have had remote studios and never had offices. Many indie teams are accustomed to working from home. Gamesindustry.biz went out to ask those with the experience to share their advice on how to guide a game studio toward remote working.

Quote from this week

“I don’t believe you should do what you’re passionate about. I believe you should be passionate about what you do. Waiting for passion to show up means waiting for fear to go away, and fear is never going to go away.” — Seth Godin on the Aubrey Marcus Podcast​