4 min read

EGD News #18

Hi there,

It’s Joakim here. Greetings from Helsinki! Here’s the weekly Elite Game Developers newsletter. Let’s get going.

EGD Blog

Auditing the Gaming CEOs calendar — You want to stay on top of your calendar. Doing regular audits to your calendar will improve your impact on the company. The CEO is the vision holder and the person who is right up there at the front. They need to be sure that the time that they’re spending is relevant and well prioritized.

When you are less than ten people, things can flow quite dynamically in the company. People show up in the morning, you have standup meetings every morning and things get done. As a CEO of a small company, you can take on a role that is familiar to you, like business development, product management, programming or game design. This is fine, but you have to have the bigger picture in mind and optimize things.

View all the previous articles on the blog by going here.

EGD Podcast

Game Development Evolution — In the latest episode of the Elite Game Developers podcast, I’m talking with game design veteran Reko Ukko, who is the Co-Founder and SVP of Game Design at Seriously Entertainment, the company behind the hit game franchise Best Fiends.

Reko has been in so many gaming companies during his career, so we spent most of the episode to cover the different game development processes that he’s seen. how do you come up with game ideas, how do you approach game mechanics and how decisions get made, to finally get a game out. From racing games to Best Fiends.

All past episodes can be found here.

Fundraising webinar was loads of fun

EGD’s first webinar went really well! We had 93 attendees from 18 countries, and a bunch of questions were asked after the presentation.

If you missed out on the webinar, you can check it out on our website by clicking here.

Alexandre Macmillan – Repeat Spend

Alexandre is back with his free-to-play monetization advise and he’s writing an article on repeat spend in IAP based games. Games have two types of IAP transactions: those that are coming in as first-time purchase from players and how much as subsequent repeat purchases from players. In this article, Alexandre highlights the way that developers should think about the repeat spend: Think about repeat purchases as a funnel.

You can read the full article by clicking here.

Naval Ravikant

Naval Ravikant has been an early investor in Silicon Valley. He’s the founder of AngelList, and investor in companies like Uber, Twitter, Yammer and many others. I’d say that Naval is one of the deepest thinkers in the world and he shares his knowledge and wisdom on his two podcasts. All the episodes last only a few minutes, so you can easily binge-listen to all of these.

Naval podcast — Naval on wealth, investing, startups, tech and life. (Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or other platforms).

The Spearhead podcast — Naval on Angel investing (Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or other platforms).

You should also check out Naval’s interview on Joe Rogan from last summer. Watch it here.

Why should you listen to Naval? For me, his thoughts have been the most transformative things that I’ve consumed since I left Next Games last year. I believe that you can experience the same kind of transformation if you give Naval a chance.

Book Recommendation

The Infinite Game (Simon Sinek) — Last fall, I wrote an article about “Start with why for gaming entrepreneurs” where I applied the learnings from Simon Sinek’s book “Start with Why”. I finally got around to reading his latest book, Infinite Game. It continues on the path that “Start with Why” laid out. You can build a company, but the purpose of the company shouldn’t be to make profits. Profits are the result, not the purpose.

Big takeaways from the book:

  • Infinite-minded leaders aren’t building companies to win, but to stay in the game
  • We do not get to choose the rules of the game of business. The only choice we get is how we want to play
  • When building incentive structures, reward behaviors like trust, cooperation, and teamwork
  • On Blackberry’s reaction to iPhone: “Disruption is often a symptom of a finite mindset. Leaders playing with a finite mindset, often miss the opportunity to use a disruptive event to their industry (iPhone starting to dominate) to clarify their cause. Instead, they double down on the finite game, and simply start copying what the other players are doing with the hope that it will work for them too.”

Something cool

I’m a big history buff. This week I wanted to find out what Manhattan looked like in the 1600s before the Dutch and British colonists started taking over the island. This video is from a TED talk in 2009, where Eric Sanderson shares how he made a 3D map of Mannahatta’s fascinating pre-city ecology of hills, rivers, wildlife — accurate down to the block — when Times Square was a wetland and you couldn’t get delivery.

​Check out the video here.