Elite Game Developers Podcast

Today I’m talking with Harri Manninen, the founding partner at Play Ventures, a seed-stages venture capital firm, with offices in Helsinki and Singapore.

I’ve known Harri for about ten years now, ever since he was building Rocket Pack, the company that he and his co-founders sold to Disney, in less than a year of founding the company. We’ll now hear how Harri made his way into venture, and how he sees the seed stage developing for gaming startups.

Also, check out Play Ventures' guide on pitching perfectly at https://playventures.vc/pitchperfect

Today I’m talking with Teemu Mäki-Patola, who is the COO and CMO of Frogmind, a Helsinki based mobile games company.

Teemu’s entrepreneurial career in gaming started at the same time as mine when he founded the Virtual Air Guitar Company in 2006. We talk about his experiences, a journey which took him to join Frogmind in the early days and to eventually getting a majority stake acquired by Supercell.

I have much admiration for Teemu. In all the dire moments in his career, he never gave up.

Today I’m talking with Anders Leicht Rohde, the co-founder and chief creative officer of Funday Factory, a mobile games company from Aarhus Denmark. Anders and I have been chatting about work-life balance, mental health, stress and burnout for a while now. We decided that it’s time to bring these discussions to the forefront, in the form of a podcast episode.

Today I chatting with Florian Steinhoff, a games entrepreneur and game maker from Berlin Germany. I remember seeing Florian on stage at GDC 2015 when he was presenting their learnings from developing Jelly Splash at Wooga. Already then, I noticed that he’s a really interesting game dev. Will now hear more about Florian and how he approaches making games.

Today I’m talking to David Gardner, general partner at London Venture Partners. On their website, they say that "We've done our 2-guys-in-a-garage start-up. We've helped companies transition from back-of-an-envelope vision to multi-billion-dollar powerhouse. It isn't a mystery to us, and our passion is to help you strategically and operationally.” We’ll now hear the lay of the land from David himself.

This is an episode that highlights all the best of the Elite Game Developers podcast, with clips from the top ten episodes of 2019. If you don't listen to any other episodes from 2019, I definitely suggest you choose from these! They cover everything from physical products, to mindset, to developing powerful habits that set you up for success.

I have a lot of big goals in the works for 2020, and if you're listening to this podcast I know you do too, so hit play, put that phone in your pocket, and let's get ready to crush it next year!

Today I’m talking Christian Ress, who is the co-founder and CEO of Playtestcloud, a playtesting service startup from Berlin, Germany. I’m fascinated about why playtests, surveys and focus group, have always been in the shadow of metrics, as a decision making tool. You can learn so much from reading player sentiment and observing their behavior. Will now cover this and more with Christian.

Teppo Soininen is the Co-Founder and CEO of Ministry of Games, a mobile gaming startup from Helsinki Finland. I’ve known Teppo for a long time, and he has been building building his games company for some time now. He has gone from longer development to rapid development, and has worked with publishers to launch their games. We now discuss the lessons he’s learned from working with publishers.

Erik Pöntiskoski is the CEO of Dodreams, a mobile games studio based in Helsinki Finland. Erik joined Dodreams to head their way into success in mobile games, and through a long period of porotyping and testing, he was able to harness the team to find greatness in their game Drive Ahead.

Joe Schaeppi and Bastian Bergmann are co-founders of 12traits, a player motivations company based out of Berlin, Germany. I’m a big fan of profiling the players that I’m approaching with a game, and guiding the discussion in the team around actual data on the target audience. It eliminates questions like should we launch before we have PVP or not, because guys like 12traits are providing you the data. Check out 12traits https://twitter.com/12traits