Elite Game Developers Podcast

In today's episode on doing yet another Ask Me Anything session, this is the sixth one I've done this year. And in this one, we're going to be talking about questions that the listeners have been sending to this questionnaire that I posted, if you want to send out your own questions by going to elitegamedevelopers.com/askmeanything that's all written together. And then once you submit the questions, I'm going to be going through them in a future episode, I promise.

In this week's podcast episode, I'm talking with Henri Lindgren, who is the CEO of Lightneer, a Helsinki based hyper casual developer. The company Lightneer has gone through lots of changes. The company was founded in 2015 to build and publish educational games, raised a bunch of VC money, but then had to pivot away from educational games. Now the company has done a turnaround and is a thriving hyper casual studio. In this discussion with Henri, we talk about pivots, how the company culture changed through the years of change, and what does hyper casual look like in 2021.

Today I'm talking with Matej Lancaric, who is a user acquisition specialist and he runs his own UA consultancy which you can find by going to lancaric.me. In this discussion, we talk about Matej's perspective on user acquisition for mobile games, how developers are becoming better at building games for UA in mind and what the future holds for game studios embracing user acquisition.

I'm talking with Arnd Benninghoff, who is the Executive Vice President of eSports and Games at MTG. MTG is a Swedish-founded strategic acquirer and operator, who've built a portfolio of games businesses which have been acquired through this Swedish family model-approach. In this episode, we talk with Arnd about the way that you can effectively bring world class game studios together and build something big as a group.

This is the second episode with Elad Levy, who is the founder and CEO of Dive, who are a new kind of game analytics provider. In the first episode that came out earlier this week, we talked with Elad about embracing data in gaming. Now we'll focus on being data informed and how game studios should get started with analytics.

In this episode, I'm talking with Joe Schaeppi and Bastian Bergmann, the founders of 12traits, a company that helps you discover and analyze your audience. I've been following the development of 12traits since my Next Games days, and the service is incredibly valuable for service-based games. In this discussion, we discuss identifying your actual audience, excluding groups that won't stick to your game, and how games can grow when you better understand your players.

Guillaume Verlinden is the Managing Director of Kolibri Games, a game studio well known for its tycoon games like Idle Miner Tycoon. Guillaume started his career in management consulting and moved to game some eight years ago when he joined Social Point. He quickly grasped what gaming was about and started improving older live games, growing many plateaued games like Monster Legends and Dragon City. In this episode, we talk about Guillaume's experiences of leading game teams, how a greenlight process should work, and why growing teams and games can be challenging.

This is my fifth Ask Me Anything podcast 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.

Today I'm talking with Ilya Eremeev, who is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner at The Games Fund. Ilya has a really interesting story about how he started as a 3D artist in gaming and has gone through a career path in gaming that has lead him to now run an early-stage VC fund. In this episode, we also talk about VC funding for the gaming ecosystem in Eastern Europe, how the region is developing, and what Ilya has seen as drivers for success.

In this episode, I'm talking with Alli Ottarsson, who is a Principal at gaming investments firm Makers Fund. Alli has had a long career in gaming, working at CCP on EVE Online, then at Riot Games on League of Legends. Recently he started doing angel investing and then eventually joined Makers Fund to become a VC. In the discussion, we talk about the game development lessons that Alli has learned and how he is now applying those lessons to investing.