Elite Game Developers Podcast

In this podcast episode, I’m talking to Carolin Krenzer, who is the co-founder and CEO of TrailMix, a mobile games studio well known for their hit merge game Love & Pies. Caro has an extensive background in free-to-play and mobile, and she has been doing her startup now since 2017.

We talk about so many things, like what Caro learned from working at Playfish and building the London studio for King, then on hiring, team building, and how execution on your core gameplay matters so much when you are building games in established game genres.

This is the eighth Ask Me Anything episode, where I answer people’s questions related to game studios, fundraising, and all other entrepreneurship-related stuff. I will be recording another episode quite soon, so please submit your questions by filling out this form. Questions that I answer include: Can you have two lead investors if two VCs are interested in you? How much is too much for Seed round? And how a hyper-casual studio should approach blockchain gaming.

In this episode, I talk with Jere Partanen and Erik Gloersen from Sisu Game Ventures, an early-stage gaming venture fund. Both Jere and Erik are newcomers to venture capital investing, although both have a background from working with gaming startups. In this discussion, we talk about the competitiveness of early-stage games investing, how a fund like Sisu can win deals and how the partners at Sisu are helping the founders they've invested in.

In this episode, I'm talking with Corentin Selz, Publishing Manager at Voodoo. Corentin has overseen the publishing activities at Voodoo for the last few years and has worked with over a hundred external studios to develop hyper-casual games. In this discussion, we talk about the optimal way to test hyper-casual games, about the characteristics of teams that can repeat their success, and how the rapid development and testing procedures could be brought outside of hyper-casual games.

I'm talking with Alon Grinshpoon, who is the founder and CEO of Echo, a cloud platform for 3D, AR, and VR assets. After realizing that the metaverse and other platforms were going to become huge, Alon and his brother started the company a few years ago, and now they've just raised a VC round for the top gaming investors. In this discussion with Alon, we talk about his founder journey, how they validated the 3D platform as a business idea, how Alon approaches founder/investor fit and how first-time founders should approach problems with their companies.

2021 was a big year for the Elite Game Developers podcast, with 53 new episodes going live. I wanted to share my own highlights from the show from the past year and created this highlights episode. Enjoy!

In this week’s podcast, I’m doing my seventh Ask Me Anything episode, where I answer listener questions. If you have any questions you’d like me to answer, please submit them by filling out this form.

These are the questions that I cover in this episode:

• How can an inexperienced shooter team raise funding?
• I want to build a web3 game. What should I do first?
• Are there angel investors dedicated to gaming?
• How should I create late-game coin sinks?
• Have you thought about doing another games company ever again?

In this podcast episode, I talking with Oskar Burman, who is the co-founder and CEO of Fast Travel Games, a VR game studio based out of Stockholm, Sweden. Oskar has a long career in gaming, all the way from the 90s, and recently he as the managing director of Rovio’s Stockholm studio, makers of Angry Birds 2. In this discussion, we talk about Oskar’s learnings from building studios, what he would do differently, and how people in gaming can manage expectations to improve their work.

In this podcast episode, I'm talking with Tatiana Kondratyeva, the co-founder and CEO of Play Pack, a mobile game studio based out of Berlin. Tatiana has an interesting career in gaming, recently being Executive Producer at Etermax, and before that having product and producer roles at Wooga and Game Insight. In this discussion with Tatiana, we talk about how to get past the fears of starting a company, how to succeed in the competitive mobile games industry, and what have been takeaways from being a founder for almost a year now.

In this week's podcast episode, I'm talking with Ville Heijari, the founder of Original Games, a new mobile games studio with people in St. Petersburg, Helsinki, and San Francisco. Ville has been in mobile games ever since his early days at Rovio when Angry Birds had just been launched. During the last dozen years, he's accumulated learnings from all sorts of places and has now teamed up with a great team of game developers. In this discussion, we talk about all the learnings from the places Ville has been at and how Original Games is approaching the merge genre with their first game, Merge Inn. And we cover so much more.