Reflections on Building Sustainable Game Companies Across Global Markets
Over the past year, Kristian Roberts has advised game companies, policymakers, and ecosystems across multiple continents. In this guest piece, he reflects on the recurring questions he hears everywhere and why the answers are both universal and deeply local.
“Games companies need to think of themselves as fan generation engines.“
– Kristian Roberts
From Kristian Roberts, CEO & Managing Partner of Nordicity:
As I review a year’s worth of games-related projects and industry conferences, it occurs to me that I’ve been answering the same questions on every continent (apart from Antarctica):
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- How do I start a games company in this economy?
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- How do I make my company more financially sustainable?
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- Where does funding come from?
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- How do we help our ecosystem?
At a high level, the answers to these questions are all the same:
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- Founders need to agree on what success means for their companies. Do they want to be the next AAA studio, a lifestyle business, or something else?
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- Games companies need to think of themselves as “fan generation engines” and then plan and hire accordingly. Without those fans (i.e., people who will buy their games), they don’t have any business in games or otherwise.
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- Funding comes from demonstrating that there are folks out there who actually care about your game, and developers are (by far) the best positioned to make that case. In other words, self-publishing should be a default assumption.
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- You help an ecosystem by designing programs and systems that enable and encourage games companies to follow the above.
However, it also strikes me that despite these similarities, the context in which I gave those answers varied dramatically. From a small (yet insightful) event in a Mexican border town to the largest games events on the planet (and innumerable points in between), the year has kept me on my toes. To implement practical solutions, we need to consider existing industry activity, political will, bureaucratic inertia, ambient entrepreneurial drive, and a host of other factors.
In other words, it’s been an interesting year attempting to come up with jurisdiction-specific, bespoke answers to global industry questions. I can’t wait for the next orbit.
Many thanks to Kristian for sharing his perspective with the XP Gaming community.
Stay tuned next week for a special announcement!
Ryan Sno-Wood and the XP Team
