Elite Game Developers Podcast

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.

This is a repost from a few years back and it's definitely one of my favorite episodes of all time. Kristian Segerstrale is the CEO Super Evil Megacorp, a games company based out of San Francisco. Kristian is a legend in gaming. He started his first games company Macrospace twenty years ago, which IPOed as Glu Mobile a few year later. Later he sold his second company Playfish to EA in 2009. We talk about being an entrepreneur in gaming, and how Kristian’s beliefs have evolved over the years, in what it takes to succeed in gaming.

This is a new episode series where a founder pitches their company to Joakim, and then Joakim shares feedback on the pitch.

The first one is with Melissa McBride from Sophia Technologies. They are using gaming and play to revolutionize education and build a digital campus where every child has access to game-based learning technology powered by VR and AI technologies.

Samer Abbas is a games professional focused on Arabic-speaking countries. His experience spans market research, game publishing, and game developer support. Samer helps global game companies grow their business in Arabic markets. He has been called "a vital figure in the Arabic games industry" and recognized in the 100 Game Changers list by GI.Biz for his work uplifting the regional game developer community. Samer is the GameFounders acceleration program director in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

In this episode, we talk about the games industry in the middle east, especially in Saudi Arabia, how things have been developing, and what the future looks like for the region.

This is a repost of an older episode I recorded some time ago on building a team in gaming. I started my first company alone as a solo founder, which was the biggest mistake I had ever made. In this episode, I talk about why you should always focus on team building when considering a startup.

Here is the original description of this episode: In April 2020, I did a webinar on the topic of Teams and team building in gaming. I went through how you'd start off building a founding team, and I cover the example of myself putting together my founding team back in 2012. Then I'll talk about the dream team in gaming, what that means, and how new founders should think about hiring to build the best team that builds the best games.

With 15 years in the games industry, Arseny Lebedev is the co-founder and CEO at Original Games (makers of Merge Inn) where he focuses on product and strategy. In this episode, we discuss building games, managing stress, and why some people are geared toward entrepreneurship.

My book, "Long Term Game: How to Build a Video Games Company," came out in March 2020. It was also released as an audiobook version, which you can find on Audible and other major online audiobook stores. I want to share with you the first chapter of the book. I hope you enjoy this read from Keith O’Brien. Get the book from here. Note that this episode is a repost from 2020. 

Here are the Elite Game Developers podcast highlights from 2022. This year, 36 podcast episodes went live, and I spoke to founders and investors from all over the globe, who all are working to build great gaming companies. Now, I want to end this year with my favorite highlights.

The transcript is available here.

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 with unique attributes that can be utilized across multiple games.

Cyril has been in the games industry for a long time. He has had leadership roles at companies like Digital Chocolate, Rovio, and EA, most recently leading the EA Helsinki studio. In this episode, we talk about Cyril's lessons learned from working in leadership, building studios, and what he sees as the true potential of interoperability of assets between games.