Elite Game Developers Podcast – Détails, épisodes et analyse

In this podcast episode from June 2023, I talk with David Kaye, who did his first games company in the 1990s. Recently, he sold his company to Embracer and is now embarking on a journey to invest in gaming founders.

This time, Pavel Afanasiev from Northern Lights Entertainment pitches his games company to me, and I share feedback. Pavel decided not to do slides, so it's a different format with pros and cons.

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

In this episode, we talk about how Maor's company changes the daily life of online marketers, including UA professionals in gaming. Then we cover Maor's background, how he approaches entrepreneurship and what lessons he's picked up along the way.

Loads of new gaming studios first spend time courting with VCs, when they should actually start from the ground floor. In this podcast episode, I talk about raising funding from angel investors and how you can build your own list of angel investor leads.

Today I'm talking with Lars Jörnow, partner at EQT Ventures. Half VC, half start-up. EQT Ventures is a multi-stage VC with €1.2bn across two funds to help fuel European tech start-ups to become global winners. Lars started his career in gaming at King over ten years and eventually transitioned into VC in 2015. Since then, he's invested in companies like Small Giant Games, Popcore, Traplight and Reworks. We'll now hear more Lars himself.

In November of 2020, I did a webinar called “Early-Stage Success in Mobile Gaming,” where I talked to Skunkworks Games Co-Founder and CEO James Cramer. This webinar is a real case study in how Skunkworks raised its angel rounds and how they built the pathway to success in mobile games while raising very little.

Today I'm talking with Vladimir Funtikov, the Co-Founder and CEO of Creative Mobile, from Tallinn, Estonia. Vlad and his team were one of the earliest mobile teams to strike it big on Android back in the day. The team started scaling things up quickly and through their rollercoaster ride, Vlad has learned a lot about company building. We'll now hear more from Vlad himself.

In October of 2020, I did a webinar on playtesting mobile games with Elie Mouraud from PlaytestCloud. We talked about how you can learn more about your game by focusing on the player's experience, from early on in the development, all the way to soft launching, and going live.

Today I'm talking with Sean Kauppinen from Hiber World. We talk about Sean's experience in gaming from three decades, how he's seen startups grow and what mistakes have come along the way. We also talk about Hiber and what the company is doing in the gaming user generated content space.

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's journey on social media and also on his podcast, Mastering Retention.

In this episode with Tom, we talk about bootstrapping a company versus the venture-backed path. How small game studios, with not a lot of cash or experience, can still break out. And what Tom thinks is the reason that developers don't build games with live ops from day one