I was working as a social media manager at a small local studio when my boss noticed I did well in client meetings.

That should have stayed a compliment. Instead it became a job - a second one, stacked on top of the one I already had, for the same paycheck and a title that only ever lived in the future tense. Account management, they called it. On a social media guy salary. “Just to see how you handle the extra load,” and once you handle it, the promotion is basically yours. Any day now. Recruitment is already running, someone is coming to take half of this off your plate.

Nobody came. For six months I did two jobs and waited for the raise that was always one hire away.

So I did the reasonable thing and went to my manager: if I am doing the work of two people, I would like the pay of two people. That is when my performance, which had been strong enough to justify doubling my workload, suddenly and mysteriously collapsed - at least according to the board. New KPIs appeared overnight, numbers a whole team could not have hit. Then, just as magically, help arrived. Except the person who arrived was not there to help me. They were there to manage me. The raise and the promotion I had been promised had been quietly converted into someone else’s hire - a candidate with “richer experience and deeper knowledge,” which is why the board chose them for the role. My role. And then they asked me to train him. Show him the ropes. Explain what was what.

None of it added up, because it was never meant to. I resigned. I took every day of unused leave I had, all at once, and that was the last they saw of me.

A promotion that only exists in the future tense is not a promotion. It is unpaid overtime with a story attached.

The fork nobody draws you a map of

Here is what took me years to see clearly. This industry has exactly one idea of what “growth” looks like, and it points in one direction: up, and into management. You get good at the thing, so they make you stop doing the thing and start running the people who still do it. Senior, then lead, then manager. As if the only way to be worth more is to get further from the work that made you worth anything in the first place.

For a lot of people that is not a promotion. It is a career change wearing a promotion’s clothes.

There is a fork in every craft job that almost nobody points at: the individual contributor track and the management track. One says you can go deeper, get more expert at the actual work, and be paid for it. The other says you move into meetings, headcount, deadlines, and other people’s problems. Both are legitimate. They are also completely different jobs. The trap is that the industry treats only one of them as “success,” dangles it as a reward, and then acts surprised when the person it promoted stops enjoying their life.

Why the cage looks like a reward

The offer is engineered to be hard to refuse.

It comes with status - a better line on the CV, a title people nod at across the table. It comes with the implication of money, even when the money is vague or, as in my case, imaginary. It comes wrapped in flattery, and flattery from someone who controls your salary is a very effective drug. And it arrives dressed as the only door out of a room you have started to outgrow, which ties it straight back to where this series began: the job stopped fitting, and here is the one exit everyone agrees is the correct one.

Saying no feels insane. Who turns down a promotion? So you say yes. You say yes to a job you never actually wanted, because the alternative feels like confessing you have no ambition.

Nobody tells you that “no thanks, I like the work I do” is a complete sentence.

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I watched it eat someone alive

A friend in QA, genuinely brilliant at it - the kind of tester who reproduces the bug nobody else can and writes it up so cleanly the fix is half done. He loved the work. He was underpaid for it and loved it anyway, which in this industry is basically a superpower.

So they offered him a team lead role. Manage the load, own the schedule, guard the deadlines. He said yes, because that is what you are supposed to say. Within weeks he was buried under project management and had no time left for the one thing he was great at and actually enjoyed. He tried to walk it back. He asked to return to the work. The board said no - you are a lead now, this is growth, be grateful.

So he changed companies. Today he tests indies at a publisher, cheerfully breaking other people’s games, and he is happier than the promotion ever made him. He did not fail upward, and he did not fail at all. He just refused to stay in a job he never wanted, and the only door out was the one marked exit.

Why this keeps happening

It would be easier if this were pure malice, but most of the time it is something duller and harder to fight: management that is simply detached from the work.

A lot of the people handing out these “promotions” have never done the craft they are promoting you out of. Plenty of them came into games from outside and have no feel for what the standards even are, so their only mental model of reward is the one every other industry uses - move the good person up and away. They genuinely think they are doing you a favor. That is exactly why the trap is so effective: it is offered with a warm handshake by someone who could not tell you what your job actually involves on a Tuesday.

Cynical? Sure. But you cannot negotiate your way out of a cage if you keep assuming the person who built it was thinking about you at all.

How to get out, or not walk in

Ask the rude question before you sign. When someone offers you a step up, ask exactly how much of your week will still be the work you actually like. If the honest answer is “almost none,” you are not being promoted, you are being reassigned. A better title on a job you will resent is a bad trade at any salary.

Negotiate the split, not just the number. This is the move too few people know about. Management does not have to be all or nothing. I know a programmer who took a lead role but got it in writing: 60% managing, 40% still hands on in the code, on a real system, shipping real things. Two years in, he is one of the only leads I know who has not quietly curdled into a bored administrator, because he never fully left the work that made him good. If your company cannot even imagine a 60/40 lead, that tells you something about the company, not about you.

Say no without apologizing. “No thank you, I am doing the work I want to do” is allowed. It is not a shortage of ambition. It is knowing what your ambition is actually pointed at, which is rarer and worth more than climbing for the sake of the climb.

And if all of that fails, leave. If the raise never arrives, if the split is refused, if “lead” turns out to mean the same person with more meetings and the same pay - do what my QA friend did, and what I did. Walk. A growing number of studios now have a real growth structure. The one you are in might just not be one of them.

What it costs, no spin

I am not going to pretend turning down the management track is free.

You give up a certain kind of status. In a lot of studios the actual job ceiling sits lower than the management one, and there are rooms you will not be invited into without “lead” on your badge. That is real, and you should walk in knowing it.

People will misread it. To a certain kind of colleague, turning down a promotion reads as a lack of drive. You will get the concerned head-tilt. You have to be okay being the person who said no to the thing everyone else is chasing. It will happen. Even I caught myself doing it when a colleague of mine told me he rejected promotion to a lead, because he likes to code. He didn’t care about money or status. He just considers code as a puzzle to solve and he’s really good at puzzles.

Sometimes the good path is not there at all. Some companies genuinely only know how to reward you by making you manage. If that is yours, the split you want may only exist somewhere else - which, again, is information, not a verdict.

The asterisk on the last piece

The previous piece in this series told you the best move is often the door right next to you, the lateral one nobody takes on purpose. Consider this the asterisk on that advice. Not every open door is a good one. Some of them are the management track dressed as a reward, and the moment you step through, it locks behind you.

The ladder is not the only way up. And the next door, the one everyone is congratulating you for opening, might be a golden cage. Check who is on the other side before you walk in.

So here is my question for you: have you ever been offered a “promotion” that would have pulled you away from the work you actually love - did you take it, or turn it down? And if you took it, did you ever find your way back? Tell me in the comments. I read every one.

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I started as a community manager.

Nobody handed me a career plan with that title. There was work that needed doing, so I did it. When PR needed covering, I covered it. When we tried self-publishing our own game and it actually went well, somebody had to talk to keep the momentum going and find new titles, sit in the calls. That somebody kept being me. A few months in, we opened a publishing arm, and I realized something that should have been obvious earlier: the parts of the job I was doing on the side were the parts I actually enjoyed.

So I moved. Not up. Sideways.

That sideways step put me in my first real business meetings, negotiating contracts, learning the industry from the inside with people far more experienced than me close enough to learn from. Later I took a short detour back into pure PR and hated it, because it cut me off from people. So I moved again - this time into a PR agency on new business, which meant travel, networking, and a crash course in every soft skill I have in me. Today I am a PR manager at a publisher, which is basically every previous role poured into one funnel. None of it was a promotion in the traditional sense. All of it was the door next to me.

Do I regret any of these moves? Not at all!

The ladder you are staring at is not the only way out of the room

The first piece in this series was about realizing the job is the problem, not you. The obvious response is to climb - get the senior title, then the lead title, then maybe management, and assume that vertical line is the only exit that counts.

It is not. In gamedev, the lateral move is everywhere and almost nobody takes it on purpose.

QA people understand the game better than half the design team and rarely get told that design is a door. Community managers spend all day reading player sentiment, which is literally the input marketing pays consultants for. Programmers who know what is actually buildable make some of the best producers in the building. The doors are right there, unlocked, and people walk past them because they are too busy looking up.

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Why nobody opens them

I have thought about this a lot, and I keep landing on one answer: fear of starting from zero.

The internal monologue goes something like, “If I sit on this stool for two more years, I get a senior badge, and that looks better on the CV.” What that math ignores is the cost of those two years. Two more years doing something that has already stopped interesting you is not a strategy, it is a slow grind. In that same time you could be picking up new skills, widening your range, and following the gut feeling about what actually fits you.

I will be blunt about my own case. I would not see myself today as a Social Media Manager, not even a senior one. What fascinates me now is completely different from what I did back then. But without that first job, I would never have found out what lights me up or where I want to be in five years. (Yes, recruiters, that was a wink.)

Starting from zero feels like loss. Usually it is the opposite. You are not erasing experience, you are repurposing it.

Five doors worth opening

A few lateral moves in this industry are so natural it is strange we still treat them as risky.

QA to design. The classic, and for good reason. QA already lives inside the systems, knows the edge cases, and can write a clear repro. That is half of design thinking. A word of honesty, because this path gets romanticized: it is a real route, not an automatic one. You still have to prove you can build, not just break.

Community to marketing. This was my own first step. If you already talk to players every day and understand what moves them, you are doing the hardest part of marketing without the title. Product marketing, user acquisition, brand - the on-ramp is short.

Programming to production. A developer who understands what is realistic to ship makes a producer people actually trust. You stop being the person estimating timelines from a spreadsheet and become the one who knows when an estimate is a fantasy. I had the pleasure of working under one of them. A brilliant programmer who ended up running the whole studio. I still admire the moves he made, and with his natural charisma and easy-going way with people, he became the rare thing: a real leader, not just a boss. The two are not the same.

Player support to community. Frontline contact with players is the rawest market research there is. Support already owns the relationship at its most painful point. Moving into community is just owning it earlier, on better terms.

Marketing or PR to publishing and biz dev. Once you understand how a game is positioned and sold, the leap to evaluating, signing, and shepherding other people’s games is smaller than it looks. This was roughly my own arc, and the publishing world is short on people who can speak both creative and commercial.

Two doors nobody points at

And then there are the moves that sound backwards until they work.

Publishing or business back into a studio. Everyone assumes the current runs one way, from making games toward the business side. The reverse move is rarer and quietly powerful. Someone who has seen how the market actually buys, sells, and funds games, then walks back into a studio, brings commercial instinct that most teams are desperate for. It looks like a step down. It is often a step into leverage.

Localization to narrative design. Nobody plans this one, and the skills transfer beautifully. A localizer spends all day inside tone, character voice, and what a line is really trying to do across cultures. That is narrative work in disguise. It is the kind of door you only notice once someone walks through it.

How to actually open the door

The clean version, the one I would tell a friend over a beer:

Start with your direct manager. Have the honest conversation about wanting to move and find out whether there is even room. The lowest-risk version is taking half the role first - keep one foot where you are, test the new thing, see if it fits you and if you fit it. A lot of lateral moves can happen inside the same company if you ask before you resent.

If instead you hit gatekeeping or get gaslit about why it is impossible, take the hint. Look at the competition, and go in with a cover letter that actually means something. And do not underestimate events. Networking is where half of these moves really happen - you meet a publisher, one thing leads to another, and suddenly there is a vacancy that was never posted.

What it costs, no spin

I am not going to sell you the lateral move as free. It is not.

You may reset on money or title. Stepping sideways can mean stepping back on pay or seniority, at least at the start. That is real and you should budget for it.

You are a beginner again. For a while you will be the least experienced person in the room doing this new thing. The impostor wave is coming. Expect to underdeliver before you overdeliver.

Your reputation resets too. People knew you as the QA person, or the community person. Now you have to prove a second thing, and some of them will keep seeing the old one for a while.

It might not land where you are. Politics, no headcount, a manager who guards their turf - sometimes the move only happens if you leave. That is not failure. Sometimes the door next to you is in a different building.

Here is the part I actually believe. The start is hard. You will doubt yourself and you will drop a few balls. What carries you through is not talent, it is stubbornness and genuine want. And if the environment around you refuses to let you grow, that is information, not a verdict. If not at this company, then maybe the next one is where you finally get room to breathe. (If you missed why staying put can quietly wreck you, that was the whole point of the last piece.)

There will be fear

Here is the other half of the truth. People fear change. They fear risk. And then sometimes they swing the other way and do something completely impulsive, no thinking attached. I have lived both. I once quit a job two weeks before my wedding, with no plan and nothing lined up, because I knew I could not last one more day in that company. Looking back, it might be the best thing that ever happened to me. It taught me exactly what I did not want from the next job, and which behaviors are a red flag I will never ignore again.

Fortune favors the brave. And even though I have done plenty of stupid things, life always pulled me back onto the right track. Not the same track every time, but still a good one.

So here is my question for you: what is the one lateral move you have quietly thought about but talked yourself out of, and what exactly is stopping you - the money, the title, or the fear of being a beginner again? Tell me in the comments. I read all of them.

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It’s 11 p.m. and you’re updating your CV. Not because you have a plan. Not because a recruiter messaged you. You’re doing it because something is wrong and you don’t have a better word for it yet, so your hands went to the one thing that feels like action. You tweak the dates. You reword a bullet point you’ve reworded four times already. You don’t send it anywhere. You close the laptop and feel slightly worse than before you opened it.

I’ve been there. Most people I respect in this industry have been there. And almost everyone reaches for the same conclusion: I need to leave. Leave the role. Leave the discipline. Leave games entirely and go do something with my hands, or my money, or my sanity. In Poland, we have a saying which can be roughly translated to - “leave everything as it is and go live in a cabin in the middle of nowhere”.

Sometimes that’s right. Usually it’s premature. Before you blow up a career you spent years building, it’s worth figuring out what actually hurts.

Three things people confuse for each other

There are at least three different problems that feel identical from the inside, and they’re all wearing the same costume of “I hate it here.”

The first is burnout. The work drained you. You used to have capacity and now you don’t, and no amount of sleep on the weekend seems to refill the tank.

The second is boredom. You outgrew the job. You can do it in your sleep, nobody’s asking anything new of you, and the flat feeling you’re calling exhaustion is actually under-stimulation.

The third is the wrong building. The work is fine. You’d happily do it for another five years. What’s poisoning you is the room you do it in: the management, the politics, the people, the crunch, the strategy you can see failing in slow motion while everyone nods along.

This piece is about the third one. The other two get their own parts, because the cure for burnout is rest and the cure for boredom is a bigger challenge, and if you misdiagnose one as the other you can waste years. But the wrong building is the one I want to start with, because it’s the most common, the most misread, and the one with the cheapest fix nobody takes.

The slow version of quitting

My version didn’t arrive as a single bad day. It came as erosion.

I worked in publishing. My job, stripped of the title, was reading the market and deciding which games we could sign and sell. And for a stretch of it, I watched us hold a set of terms that the market had quietly walked away from. Revenue splits that looked greedy next to what everyone else was offering. Deal structures built for a year that no longer existed. Developers had options now, good ones, and we were acting like they didn’t.

I said so. Repeatedly. I’d point at a project and explain why a leaner pitch would be easier to market and more likely to convert, why a little flexibility on terms would land us the studio instead of losing it to the publisher down the road who’d already adjusted. I’m not claiming I’m never wrong. But there’s a specific feeling, and if you’ve had it you know it, of watching someone push a rock uphill while paying you to tell them the hill exists.

Here’s the part that does something to you over time. Flag enough problems and you stop being the person with foresight. You become the difficult one. The pessimist. The guy who kills great ideas. I’d build contingency plans for crises that hadn’t happened yet, quietly, and file them in a drawer, and when the thing I’d warned about finally hit the fan I’d open the drawer and be ready. That should make you valuable. Instead it makes you annoying, because being ready for the fire is an implied accusation that someone started it.

The standard response to my warnings was “try it my way, and we’ll figure it out on the way.” Which sounds like asking for some time to think about it, until you notice it’s not. I’d get the runway, the market would do exactly what I said it would, and roughly six months later the conversation would flip: you’re not effective, you’re not closing deals, why aren’t you signing games. The terms I’d been told to work within were the reason. But the terms were never on trial. I was. A couple of years went by, but I still remember the feeling.

That’s the thing about the wrong building. It doesn’t burn you out through overwork. It burns you out by hiring you for your judgment and then treating your judgment as the problem.

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Why “same job, new company” is the most underrated move in the industry

I kept trying until the end. I had a recovery plan drafted, a whole sequence of changes I wanted to put in front of leadership. I never got to present it. Management decided it was time to part ways, and that was that.

What surprised me was my own reaction. I expected sadness. What I got was anger, the clean useful kind, because the work was sound and someone had thrown it in the bin unread.

So I did the obvious thing that almost nobody does. I didn’t change careers. I didn’t change discipline. I took the exact same job to a different company and brought the binned strategy with me.

Nine games signed in the first twelve months. Three of them in the first three.

I want to be careful about how I tell that, because the lesson isn’t “I’m great.” The lesson is that I was the same person doing the same job, and the only variable that changed was the building. Same skills, same instincts, same playbook that got me labeled difficult. Different environment, and suddenly the playbook just worked. It wasn’t me. It was never me. The room I’d been standing in had bad cards, and a new room dealt me better ones.

This is why I think the lateral company move is the single most overlooked option in games. We’ve built a culture where leaving your role feels like the brave, decisive thing, and leaving your company quietly for the same title feels like a sideways shuffle that doesn’t count. It’s backwards. The lateral move is cheap. You keep your seniority, your skills, your salary trajectory, the years you’ve banked. And if your actual problem is the people, the management, or the strategy, it fixes the actual problem instead of an imaginary one.

You don’t need a reinvention. You need a different table.

How to tell which problem you’ve got

The hard part is that all three problems produce the same Monday-morning dread, so you can’t diagnose by feel. You have to ask better questions.

On a genuinely good day, when the politics are quiet and nothing’s on fire, do you still enjoy the craft itself? If yes, you’re probably not burned out on the work. Something around the work is the issue.

Is it the job that’s draining you, or the meetings about the job? Those are very different ailments. One says the work is wrong for you. The other says the organization is wrong for the work.

And the cleanest test I know: if you imagine the same role, same tasks, same discipline, but a manager who actually wanted what you wanted and a leadership that listened, does the dread lift? If it does, you don’t have a career problem. You have an address problem. And you can change your address without changing who you are.

The honest catch

I won’t sell you the lateral move as a miracle, because sometimes you change companies and the same rot shows up in the new place wearing a different lanyard.

Two reasons that happens. Sometimes it really is the industry, not the building, and no amount of company-hopping fixes a structural problem that every studio shares. That’s a real possibility and it’s the subject of the last part of this series. And sometimes, uncomfortably, the pattern travels with you, because the common factor in every room you’ve hated is you, and that’s worth sitting with honestly before you blame the next employer.

But here’s what tipped me toward “it was the building, not me.” When I landed somewhere with a boss who got it, the relief wasn’t subtle. I went from being micromanaged to being handed the keys, and the moment I had a free hand I started building things that worked. Procedures, weird little experiments, the kind of stuff you only try when nobody’s standing over your shoulder waiting to call it a bad idea.

One of them: I was chasing a studio in South Korea, and instead of firing off the standard English cold email, I translated the whole thing into Korean and dropped an English version underneath, just in case. I got a reply in Korean. We kept the entire conversation going that way, slower because of the translation, but it happened at all only because of that one decision. The developer told me later he wasn’t comfortable doing business in English, so Korean was the only door that was ever going to open. I’d bet my hand that the same email in English gets no answer. That’s how I knew. The skill didn’t change. The room did.

So before you torch everything

If you’re updating your CV at 11 p.m. with no plan, do one thing first. Don’t ask “should I leave the industry.” Ask “would I be fine doing this exact job somewhere the people weren’t like this.” Be honest about the answer, because the two questions have wildly different price tags, and most people pay the expensive one to solve a problem the cheap one would’ve fixed.

I want to hear from the room on this. Have you ever changed companies, kept the exact same role, and felt the fog lift, or did the same problems follow you to the next place? Because I’ve watched both happen, and I genuinely can’t always predict which one it’ll be.

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You know that silence. Someone just got feedback, they go very still, say “okay, thanks” in a tone that means the exact opposite, and you both spend the next five minutes pretending that was a normal conversation. You’ve been on both sides of it. So have I.

The games industry is genuinely bad at this. We pitch games and get non-answers dressed up as feedback. We send builds and get “looks great!” from people who clearly launched it for thirty seconds and closed it. We sit in review meetings where nobody says what they actually think - and then the project ships broken and everyone acts surprised.

And then there’s the other kind. Someone decides that honesty means skipping the part where they consider you’re a human being. That one leaves a mark too. I do appreciate honesty, but being an ass is not something I consider a professional skill, no matter how senior you are.

Neither works. I’ve been on enough sides of this table to have opinions about what does.

Why feedback goes wrong

Before we get into technique, it helps to understand why feedback conversations fail in the first place. There are usually three reasons.

The first is that the person giving feedback hasn’t decided what they actually want to achieve. Are you trying to improve the work? Manage expectations? Document that you flagged an issue? These are different goals and they require different approaches. Feedback given without a clear purpose tends to be vague, contradictory, or more about the giver than the receiver.

The second is that the person receiving feedback hasn’t separated their identity from the work. This is especially common in games, where teams spend years on a project and the line between “my game” and “me” gets blurry. When that line disappears, feedback on the game feels like feedback on the person. Every note becomes a judgment. Every suggestion becomes a criticism. The defensiveness that follows isn’t weakness - it’s a predictable response to feeling personally attacked.

The third is that both parties are performing. The giver performs confidence and authority. The receiver performs openness and gratitude. Neither of them is being honest.

The feedback that gets said in that room is not the feedback that gets discussed afterward in the car park or at the after party.

Giving feedback that actually lands

There’s a framework I keep coming back to when I think about feedback done well. Five steps, simple in theory, consistently ignored in practice. Let me walk through each one with the gamedev context in mind.

Setting - choose the right moment

This one sounds obvious until you see how often it gets ignored.

A developer just came off stage after showing their game publicly for the first time. They’re running on adrenaline, relief, and anxiety in roughly equal measure. This is not the moment to tell them the combat feels off. This is the moment to be a human being - say something genuine and supportive, and save the detailed feedback for a few days later when they can actually hear it.

In practice: I once received bad news on a Friday afternoon - a message that we needed to talk on Monday because there were concerns about my performance. What followed was the worst weekend of my professional life up to that point. By the time Monday came around, I’d already processed every possible outcome, none of them good. The feedback itself ended up being manageable - we made a plan, I proved my value, and I stayed at that company for a long time afterward. But the timing was unnecessary cruelty. The person delivering it has since acknowledged the same. Don’t do that to people.

If someone sends you a build right before a milestone deadline and you have serious concerns, ask yourself whether those concerns can wait 48 hours. A developer in crunch who gets a wall of critical notes at 11pm on a Friday processes none of it. The same notes on Monday morning, framed properly, might actually change something.

Framing - say what you’re trying to do before you do it

Before you get into the content of your feedback, establish your intent.

“Everything I’m about to say comes from wanting to help make this better - can I share it?” is not a diplomatic nicety. It’s information. It tells the person you’re not attacking them, you’re not performing authority, you’re not ticking a box. You’re trying to be useful.

I’ve also learned - the hard way - to clarify the nature of my feedback explicitly. Because I tend to spot problems early, I’ve been told more than once that I’m “killing good ideas” or “being negative.” What was actually happening was that I was seeing risks two or three steps ahead. The content was valid. The framing wasn’t landing. Now I say upfront: “I’m not trying to sink this - I want to flag something I’m seeing before it becomes a bigger problem.” That one sentence changes the entire dynamic.

In the publisher-developer context: if you start with “these are my observations, not requirements - I want to hear your thinking on them,” you’ll get a different conversation than if you just send a list of changes.

Praise specifically - not as a warm-up, but because it’s useful

Not the sandwich. Actual, specific acknowledgment of what’s working.

People close to their work lose perspective on what’s genuinely good about it. A developer who has been staring at the same level for six months cannot see it the way a fresh player sees it.

I had a junior once who was inexperienced but genuinely sharp - he just didn’t have the skills yet to execute on his own thinking. My mistake early on was giving him simple tasks and leaving him to it. What actually worked was spending at least an hour a day teaching him - a kind of informal Top 100 tricks to perform better as a community manager. Building his skills while he built his confidence. It blew his mind. He started scheduling, expanding and promoting like crazy. I checked his LinkedIn recently - he’s now a Senior Community Manager at a Danish company. That didn’t happen because I gave him tasks. It happened because I told him specifically what he was already doing well, and then gave him the tools to do more of it.

Specific praise also makes the critical feedback that follows more credible. If your observations about what works are precise and accurate, your observations about what doesn’t work carry more weight.

Be specific and use “I” statements

This is where most feedback in the games industry falls apart.

“The onboarding is too long” is a judgment. “I lost track of what I was supposed to be doing around the fifteen-minute mark” is an observation. The first invites an argument. The second invites problem-solving.

I reviewed a game once - Vilde - that was rushed, released too early, with systems that didn’t work and balance that felt deeply unfair. I wrote a long email. Respectful, specific, with references to comparable games in the genre and concrete suggestions. Twelve months later, the developer came back to tell me he’d rebuilt most of the game - the UI, the mechanics, the character and weapon balance. He wanted to know if I’d give it another shot. I will. That conversation only happened because the feedback was grounded in specific observations, not general disappointment. Remember Hello Games? Same energy. A developer who takes a rough start and rebuilds rather than disappears is rare - and they can only do that if the feedback they received gave them something to work with.

“I noticed...” and “I found myself...” and “I had the impression that...” - these phrases do a specific job. They make clear you’re reporting your experience, not declaring objective truth.

Don’t end on the problem

Ending a feedback session on “here are the things that need to change” leaves the person with problems in their head and no counterweight.

I also know from experience that I’m not always right. I’ve given feedback based on my own genre preferences and discovered afterward that I was simply the wrong audience for that game - that the thing I was criticizing was a deliberate design choice that made complete sense for a different player. Being old enough to recognize when you’re incompatible with a genre, rather than assuming the game is wrong, is something that comes with time. Now I say it explicitly: “I might not be the right person to evaluate this particular thing - here’s my experience with it, make of it what you will.”

That acknowledgment is itself a form of empowerment for the person receiving the feedback. It tells them they’re allowed to weigh what you’ve said.

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The gamedev-specific piece nobody talks about: credibility

Feedback lands differently depending on who gives it.

A publisher who has shipped twenty games in the same genre has credibility giving notes on level pacing. A publisher who primarily publishes narrative games giving structural feedback on a competitive multiplayer game has much less.

I’ve also learned something about how I’m perceived that took me a while to understand. Because I’m a perfectionist, because I care deeply about what I work on, and because my voice apparently sounds like a sixty-year-old who smoked for decades, I can come across as harsh before people know me well. The feedback I’ve received about being a “difficult” or “critical” person has sometimes been accurate - but often it’s been from people who hadn’t spent enough time with me to understand that the criticism comes from the same place as the investment. Once they see that, we end up getting on well. Many of them I run into at events and we’re genuinely friendly.

So now I explain myself in real time - like the Elcor from Mass Effect, spelling out the emotional intent alongside the content. “I’m flagging this because I want this to succeed, not because I want to be right.” It shouldn’t be necessary. It helps anyway.

Receiving feedback without losing your mind

How you receive feedback determines whether you keep getting useful feedback in the future. From anyone.

Buy yourself time before you respond

The worst responses to feedback happen in the first thirty seconds. The defensiveness, the justification, the counter-argument that starts with “yes, but” - these come from reacting before you’ve processed what was said.

Most feedback, even badly delivered feedback, has something true in it. Finding that true thing is your job as the receiver.

Separate the message from the delivery

This is something I’ve had to practice. The worst performance feedback I’ve ever received came in situations where I genuinely didn’t have enough to work with - where the conditions I was operating under made success nearly impossible, and then the failure was attributed entirely to my performance. That hurt. It made me doubt myself. It took about a week to process and then I came out the other side and found something new quickly. And six months later, at a different company with better conditions, I was hitting targets in two to three months that had been impossible at the previous job.

The feedback wasn’t entirely wrong. I wasn’t performing. But it was missing crucial context - and the delivery left me with nothing to work with except self-doubt.

Filter the delivery. Extract the content. Decide later whether to have a separate conversation about how they communicated.

Don’t perform gratitude you don’t feel

“Thanks for the feedback, really helpful” said through gritted teeth helps nobody. It trains the person giving feedback to think they’re doing it well when they’re not.

There’s also a version of this that’s specifically about standing your ground. I’ve received feedback that I was wrong about something, pushed back with data and market analysis, and had that dismissed because of hierarchy. My usual approach in those situations: nod, take note, thank them. And if the gap between their position and the evidence is too large to bridge, that’s usually when our paths diverge. I don’t like fighting that battle. It rarely ends well for either party.

When the feedback is about you, not your work

This is the hardest category - feedback about your attitude, your communication style, how you show up on a bad day.

The worst thing you can do when someone tells you that you’ve been difficult, closed off, or unpleasant to work with is to get defensive or shut down. It doesn’t matter how good you are at your job. A senior developer who poisons the atmosphere around them doesn’t keep their seat for long. The games industry is full of talented people - talent alone doesn’t protect you from the consequences of being genuinely hard to be around.

That said - fighting your corner is fine. Not all personal feedback is accurate, and you’re allowed to disagree. I’ve been confused with someone else and had someone go to considerable lengths to convince me that I was the person they were describing - when I wasn’t. I tried calmly to explain the mistake. Eventually I stopped trying and offered to reset entirely and start from scratch. Some people are going to have made up their minds regardless of the evidence.

But when the feedback is accurate - when you’ve been difficult because life is difficult right now - own it directly and without making it a bigger deal than it needs to be. Something like: “Look, I’ve had a lot going on lately and I know I haven’t been easy to be around. I’m aware of it. If I’ve been short with anyone, I’m sorry - that’s on me.”

Then do something small and concrete to reset the atmosphere. Order lunch for the team. I once brought Karpatka for the entire team - a great cream cake I love, and wanted to give them something which I also cherish, as a “I’m sorry” gesture. Small gestures after a difficult patch signal that you’re present and that you care, which is often all people need to move on.

The specific contexts

Publisher feedback on a game in development

The most functional publisher-developer feedback loops have one thing in common: clarity about what kind of feedback is being given. There’s a difference between “here’s an issue we see” and “here’s a change we require.”

I’ve watched a publisher gradually take over the creative direction of a project through accumulated notes - each one seeming reasonable in isolation, until collectively they’d replaced everything the developer had originally made. The game didn’t sell. The publisher blamed the studio. The studio blamed the publisher. What was missing from the beginning was a clear agreement about where the boundary was between input and mandate.

If something is a requirement, say so. If something is a suggestion, say that too. Ambiguity here costs everyone time.

The worst feedback I’ve ever seen from a publisher was simple: “It’s shit,” followed by standing up and leaving. Zero context, zero direction, zero humanity. That’s not feedback. That’s a display of power. It helps nobody.

Feedback on a pitch

Getting feedback after a pitch that didn’t land is one of the most valuable things you can do, and most people don’t ask for it. Ask specifically. The feedback you get in that five-minute conversation is worth more than a dozen pitch prep sessions.

And when you get it, don’t argue. Listen, say thank you, and leave.

Feedback in small teams

Small studios are where feedback gets the most personal, because everyone knows everyone and the stakes feel higher. I once had to write what amounted to a formal assessment of an entire publishing division - pointing out that our reputation was suffering, that our terms were getting worse, that developers would soon stop signing with us because word travels fast in this industry. The feedback was correct. The response was not good. But I wasn’t able to sit on it - that’s not how I’m built. I said what needed to be said.

Sometimes that’s the cost of being honest. Sometimes it’s also the right call regardless. I was kindly asked to look for another job, but I knew I wasn’t the problem and found the next one fairly quickly. And I can still sleep like a baby.

One last thing

I’ve come to think that the best feedback culture isn’t about technique. It’s about trust. When you trust that the person giving you feedback wants the work to succeed - not to demonstrate their own authority or cover their own position - you can hear things you couldn’t hear otherwise.

And on the receiving end: I’ve learned that I need positive reinforcement more than I usually admit, that I sometimes hold on to criticism longer than is useful, and that the moments I’m most defensive are usually the moments I most need to listen. That’s not a comfortable thing to know about yourself. It’s useful.

It takes practice. Give one piece of specific feedback this week that you’d normally soften into uselessness. Receive one piece of feedback this week without immediately justifying yourself.

See what happens.

Everyone has one feedback they’d take back, and one they wish they’d heard sooner. What are yours? Drop it in the comments - I’ll read every one.

Photo courtesy of Nordic Game

Every year thousands of developers show up to showcase floors at events like Digital Dragons, Nordic Game, PAX, Gamescom, or GIC with a laptop, a build, and a vague plan to “show people the game.” Most of them leave exhausted, with a handful of business cards they can’t remember the context for and a nagging sense they could have done more. I feel you, I’ve been there.

Running a showcase booth well is a skill. It’s not complicated, but it requires preparation that most developers skip because they’re busy finishing the build. This is the guide I wish someone had given me earlier.

Before the event: the preparation nobody talks about

Your build is not the only thing that needs to be ready.

Most developers spend 95% of their pre-event energy on the build and 5% on everything else. The ratio should be closer to 70/30. A slightly rougher build with excellent booth setup will outperform a polished build where nobody can find the controls and you run out of business cards or stickers/pins by noon on day one.

Make a checklist. Not a mental checklist - a written one. Here’s a starting point.

Hardware

1. Laptop or dedicated device with the build installed locally (don’t rely on the internet connection)

2. Backup device if possible - builds crash, hardware fails

3. Controller(s) fully charged and tested with this specific build

4. Charging cables and power strips

5. Headphones if audio is important to the experience - open showcase floors are loud

6. Monitor or TV if the event doesn’t provide one, and you’ve confirmed your setup space

Printed materials

1. Business cards - more than you think you need. Run out on day one and you’ve lost every conversation from that point on

2. Control layout sheet - printed, laminated if possible, on the table at all times

3. One-page fact sheet about the game: genre, platform, release window, team size, what you’re looking for

4. QR code to your Steam page, itch.io, or wherever people can wishlist or follow - large enough to scan from standing distance

Signage

1. Clear title and genre visible from walking distance. Someone deciding whether to stop has about two seconds to make that decision - make it easy

2. Remember to have a QR code in the corner of the keyart right on the showcase branding - it saves time and people can scan it without having to stay in the queue.

3. Any content warnings if relevant - better to have them visible than to explain mid-demo - very important for people with epilepsy and other medical conditions.

Booth Decor and something to take away

Stickers, pins, keychains, postcards - anything small, branded, and connected to the game. People pick them up, put them on laptops and bags, and every time they see it they think of your game. It’s the cheapest marketing you’ll ever do.

But the best booth decoration isn’t always the most obvious one. When I was promoting a game at an event, I brought baguette plushies and mini Eiffel Towers with French flags - anything that fit the game’s theme. I was the only booth in three or four rows of computers that had anything like it on the table. It was a great opener, people stopped by to complement the decor.

Laid out on a tablecloth that looked like proper fabric, it ended up looking genuinely premium - not tacky, not cheap. People stopped just to look at the setup before they even knew what the game was. I put some candies in a bowl - a Polish brand at a Czech event was something worth highlighting when talking about a Polish studio making the game. I built a routine around it, and it was easier to follow when you matched your sentences with the physical stuff around you.

That’s the point. A booth that looks like it was thought about draws attention before you say a single word. You don’t need a massive budget - you need something that makes someone slow down as they’re walking past and think “what’s going on over there?”

The control layout sheet deserves its own section

This is the single most underrated piece of showcase preparation and the one most commonly skipped.

Your game makes complete sense to you. You’ve played it hundreds of hours. You know that left bumper is a dodge and holding X picks up items without thinking about it. The person sitting down at your booth has never played it, has probably just come from three other booths, and has about thirty seconds of patience before they feel stupid and want to stop.

Print the control layout. Put it on the table, face up, right next to the controller. Not tucked to the side - in the natural eyeline of someone holding the controller. Laminate it if you can. Update it if the build changes.

This single thing reduces the number of people who put the controller down in frustration by a significant margin. It also reduces the number of times you have to interrupt a demo to say “oh, that button does X” - which breaks the player’s experience and your ability to observe their natural reactions.

The QR code on the table

One QR code, large, on a physical card or printed sheet on the table. It should go directly to your Steam wishlist page, playtests signing, google surveys asking for a feedback, your itch.io page, or wherever the most useful action is for your current stage of development.

Don’t send people to your website homepage, your Twitter, or a Linktree. Send them to one specific place where they can do one specific thing. If you’re in early access, that’s wishlisting. If you’re released, that’s the store page. If you’re pre-announcement, that might be a newsletter signup. The less clicks they have to do on the way to your key goal, the better.

Test the QR code before the event. On multiple phones. In varying lighting conditions. Showcase floors are often dim, and a QR code that works perfectly on your iPhone might not scan on an Android in bad light.

Feedback collection

This is where most developers leave enormous value on the table.

If people are playing your game and you’re not collecting structured feedback, you’re getting impressions you’ll half-remember by day two. Build a simple feedback mechanism before the event.

The simplest version: a paper survey with five to seven questions, a pen, and a stack of sheets on the table. Something like:

1. Have you played games in this genre before? (yes / no / sometimes)

2. How did the controls feel? (1-5)

3. What was your first impression of the visual style? (open)

4. Was anything confusing or frustrating? (open)

5. Would you wishlist / buy this game? (yes / maybe / no)

6. Anything else? (open)

The first question is the most important one for filtering purposes, which I’ll come back to.

The digital version: a Google Form on a tablet or phone, QR code on the table next to the game. Works well if you have two people at the booth - one managing the demo, one directing people to the feedback form after.

If you have time, try to construct the questions to fit a closed structure - sometimes people are reluctant to write answers to open questions, but clicking through simple 1-5 rating makes the instinct kick in, and their answers might be what they are actually feeling right now. It’s also faster ;)

During the event: running the booth

The first thirty seconds rule is legit.

Someone has stopped at your booth. They’re looking at the screen. You have about thirty seconds before they either sit down, pick up the controller, or move on.

Don’t pitch at them immediately. Let them look. If they seem interested, one sentence: “Want to try it?” is enough. If they want to know more first: one sentence about what the game is. Not the full elevator pitch - one sentence. “It’s a roguelike dungeon crawler where you play as a crashed pilot-robot trying to rebuild his ship and come back to his home planet with a Pratchet-vibed humor” gives them enough to decide whether they want to play it or not.

The goal of the first thirty seconds is to get them into the demo, not to explain everything about the game. The demo will do more work than your words will.

While they’re playing: observe, don’t coach

This is hard, especially if you’re proud of the game and want them to see the best of it.

Resist the urge to narrate while they play. Don’t say “oh, and if you go right there’s a cool thing” or “that’s not actually how most people do it.” Watch what they do. Where do they go first? What do they try? Where do they get stuck? What makes them laugh, or lean forward, or put the controller down?

Their natural, unguided experience of the game is information. Every time you intervene to redirect them, you’re erasing data.

There are exceptions: if they’re stuck in a way that will end the demo in thirty seconds and they’ve clearly missed a tutorial element, a gentle “there’s a hint in the top right if you need it” is fine. But “you should try going left” is not. Imagine someone buying the game after the premiere - will you be over their shoulders 24/7 to explain what to do? Exactly.

After the demo: the conversation

When they finish - whether they completed a level, died, or just put the controller down - this is the most valuable part of the interaction if you handle it well.

“What did you think?” is the worst opening question because it’s too broad. Try asking:

“What was the first thing that felt confusing?” “Was there a moment where you felt like you understood what the game wanted from you?” “Did the controls feel natural by the end?”

Specific questions get specific answers. “What did you think?” gets “yeah it was cool” and then they leave.

If they seem genuinely engaged, ask directly: “Do you play games in this genre? I ask because I’m trying to understand who the audience is.” That question does two things: it filters their feedback for relevance, and it makes them feel like a collaborator rather than a test subject, which changes the quality of what they share.

Filtering feedback in real time

This is where the “have you played games in this genre before” question becomes essential.

Someone who has never played a roguelike will tell you that losing all progress on death is broken and unfair. They’re not wrong from their perspective - but that perspective is not your target audience. If you redesign your death mechanic based on that feedback, you’ll lose your core players without gaining new ones.

This doesn’t mean ignoring non-target feedback entirely. Sometimes someone outside the target audience identifies a real problem - a confusing UI element, a tutorial gap, a technical issue - that your core players have been tolerating because they’re used to the genre conventions. Filter by source, not by whether you like what you’re hearing.

I’ve learned to separate feedback into three categories:

1. Core - comes from your target audience, identifies a real friction point, is specific and actionable.

2. Non-core - comes from outside your target audience, reflects genre unfamiliarity rather than a problem with your game.

3. Fresh - comes from outside your target audience but identifies something that might be a genuine accessibility or clarity issue worth considering separately. This one is tricky, as you might never have thought about it during development.

The paper survey with the genre question helps you do this retroactively when you’re reviewing feedback after the event.

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Managing the queue

I really hope that will happen to your booth! If your game is generating interest, you’ll have people waiting. Have a system.

The simplest: a visible sign or verbal communication about session length. “Each session is about ten minutes” sets expectations and prevents the person playing from feeling guilty about holding up a queue, and prevents the people waiting from getting frustrated. It can also be implemented in the build, right after the game starts or even in the main menu.

If you have a queue and someone waiting turns out to be a publisher or investor, it’s okay to have a brief side conversation while the current player is playing - but don’t abandon the player. Split attention, keep one eye on the demo, don’t make the person who sat down feel like they’ve suddenly become invisible. I’ve been the player. I’ve been abandoned when a publisher or investor came. I understood why I was abandoned, but still - felt weird.

Don’t freak out when someone asks for an interview

If a journalist stops at your booth and asks for an interview - don’t panic. It’s a good thing. A great thing, actually.

Have a designated person who handles press conversations. Ideally someone who knows the game inside out and can talk about it naturally without reading off a mental script. If that’s you, great. If it’s your game director or lead designer, make sure they’re reachable and know they might be pulled over at short notice. And for the love of god, please let that be someone who speaks English :) It doesn’t have to be perfect, hell, it doesn’t even have to be with a great accent - English is flexible, we’ve heard many pronunciations of the same thing - context matters and a coherent, but clumsy sentence is better than a sophisticated nonsense.

A few things worth having ready before the event: a short description of the game in plain language - not the Steam page copy, something you’d actually say out loud to another person. Two or three interesting things about the development process or the team. And a honest answer to “when is it coming out” that doesn’t make you sound evasive.

Press interviews at showcases are rarely formal. Most of the time it’s someone with a phone or a recorder asking a few questions while you stand next to the booth. Be conversational, be honest, and don’t over-prepare to the point where it sounds rehearsed. The most memorable developer interviews are the ones where the person sounds genuinely excited about what they’re making - not like they’re reciting a press kit.

One practical note: if someone asks to take photos or video of the gameplay, say yes. Always say yes. You want that coverage. Just make sure the build on screen at that moment is one you’re happy to have published. There is a one in a million chance that this guy has the reach to showcase your title to many people who might have never heard about your game and are ready to wishlist any recommendation.

The publisher or investor who stops by

When someone from a publisher or investment firm stops at your booth - and at industry events, some will - handle it like a demo with additional awareness.

Let them play if they want to. Don’t immediately switch into pitch mode. The game speaks first. After the demo, you can shift gears: “Are you here for business or just browsing the floor?” is a direct question that tells you how to calibrate the next five minutes.

If they’re interested and don’t have a meeting slot with you, get their card and ask explicitly: “Would you be open to a proper meeting? I can send you a request through Meet2Match or reach out directly.” Don’t assume interest means they’ll follow up - make the ask clear.

The most dangerous words at a showcase are “this is exactly what we’re looking for.” They feel great in the moment. They’re also said to approximately forty other developers at the same event. Be glad when someone responds warmly - just don’t start mentally spending the advance until they’ve replied to your follow-up email. The same applies if you’re a service-provider and have a lot of meetings. Those hyper-optimistic guys rarely reply afterward - and when they do, they often back out.

Business cards and contact information

Keep your business cards in one specific, consistent place at the booth - not in your pocket where you’re fumbling for them, not in a bag under the table. On the table, in a small holder or a neat stack, visible and accessible.

When someone asks for a card, give them one and ask for theirs. Write a one-word context note on their card immediately after the conversation - “publisher / action games” or “press / GIC” - because by the end of day two you will not remember who gave you which card. Do this even if it slightly slows the handoff. One method my friend uses is simply taking selfies with people he had a great conversation with.

If someone doesn’t have a card - increasingly common - have a way to exchange contact information quickly. A QR code to your LinkedIn or email is faster than watching someone type in your address. I’ve seen many great ideas for speeding up the process - one guy even had a QR code to his LinkedIn profile as his wallpaper, so he didn’t have to unlock his phone. Just a tap, and he was ready. Brilliant!

Make some friends & exchange knowledge

The people running the booth next to yours are not your competition for the weekend - they’re your most accessible playtesters. Ask them to try your game during a quiet moment. Buy them a coffee, discuss their game, return the favor.

It’s the game industry equivalent of food truck festivals, where chefs swap dishes with the stall next door instead of eating their own food all day. They do it for free, because a fresh perspective from someone who understands the craft is worth more than any formal playtest session. A developer who has spent the last two days watching people struggle with the same onboarding moment will see your game with completely different eyes - and they’ll tell you things your regular playtesters won’t, because they speak the same language.

The best feedback I’ve seen come out of showcase floors didn’t come from the structured sessions or the publisher meetings. It came from two developers standing at each other’s booths at 5pm on day two, being completely honest with each other because they had nothing to lose and everything to gain.

Not everyone will say nice things

You will get negative reactions. This is fine.

Some people will play for thirty seconds and put the controller down without a word. That’s not always a sign that your game is bad. Maybe they don’t speak English very well and are afraid of having a conversation. Some will be introverts attending their first-ever event. Some will tell you something you don’t want to hear. Some will be in a hurry and give you nothing useful.

Don’t take any of this personally during the event. You’re running a data collection exercise as much as you’re showing a game. Every interaction - including the short ones and the uncomfortable ones - is information.

Process your feelings about it after the event, in private, not in between demos. As hard as it is, don’t let your bad mood from a previous conversation influence the opening of your next one.

Take care of yourself

Showcase floors are loud, long, and socially exhausting. If you’re staffing a booth alone for eight hours, you will be a worse version of yourself by hour six. If at all possible, bring someone with you - a teammate, a friend, anyone who can cover the booth for thirty minutes while you eat something and sit down somewhere quiet. I’ve been to Brno alone and had to ask people on the booths next to mine to keep an eye on my equipment and personal stuff under the table. That’s not comfortable, and you’ll never know who you’re going to meet.

Eat before the floor opens. Bring water. Wear comfortable shoes. These sound like obvious things and they are, but the number of developers I’ve seen visibly depleted by mid-afternoon day one because they didn’t plan for the physical reality of the day is higher than it should be. I always bring extra snacks and water - I’m a people person, so I can see if someone needs support. Being the one who helps opens up the conversation, you’re making friends and you never know who will be where in the next couple of years. Some of these people helped me get an intro when I really needed it.

Stay for the after party - but know your limits

When the showcase floor closes, the networking doesn’t. Some of the best conversations happen in the evening - over dinner, at a bar, or at one of the unofficial gatherings that form naturally after the official program ends. The people you spent all day pitching to are suddenly just people having a drink. The dynamic shifts, the conversations go deeper, and the relationships that started at the booth get a chance to become something more than a business card exchange.

Go. Stay for a while. Let the day decompress properly - it helps with the mental overload that comes from eight hours of demos, questions, and conversations.

Just don’t overdo it. You have another day tomorrow, and showing up exhausted and fragile on day two of a three-day event is one of the more avoidable mistakes in the showcase handbook. One drink too many is fine. Four is a problem you’ll feel at 8am when you’re trying to remember someone’s name and why you were supposed to email them.

The after party is part of the job. Treat it like the job - be present, be genuine, and leave while you can still do both.

If you want to go deeper on how to approach the social side of industry events - the mixers, the dinners, the unofficial gatherings - I've written about it in detail separately. The principles are the same whether you're at the booth or at the bar.

After the event: the follow-up most developers skip

Go through every business card and every piece of feedback within 48 hours of the event. Not a week later. Not “when you have time.” 48 hours, while the context is still fresh.

For business cards: log them somewhere (a spreadsheet, a CRM, even a notes app). I use Airtable - it’s cheap, looks nice and is highly customizable. Pair it with the context note you wrote and a one-line reminder of the conversation. Then decide who gets a follow-up and what that follow-up says. A specific follow-up referencing something from your actual conversation is worth ten generic “great to meet you” emails.

How do you remember who you met at an event? Make quick notes - name, company, some context. Could be on your phone or in a notebook. A notebook looks nicer, but asking if you can take notes on your phone rarely gets a negative reaction

For feedback forms: go through them with the genre filter in mind. Group signal feedback by theme. Look for patterns - if five people independently mentioned the same confusion point, that’s not a coincidence. Prioritize accordingly.

And one more thing: if someone gave you genuinely useful, detailed feedback at the booth - a player who spent twenty minutes with the game and gave you a thorough rundown - follow up with a thank you. Not a form email. A real one. It takes two minutes and people remember it. The games industry is small. That player might be a journalist, a streamer, a developer, or just someone with a large following who loved talking about your game. Treat them accordingly.

The difference between a showcase that generates momentum and one that generates a pile of business cards you never follow up on is almost entirely preparation and intentionality. The game is the game - you can’t change that at the event. But how you present it, how you collect feedback from it, and what you do with that feedback afterward is entirely within your control.

The summary

Somewhere out there is a developer setting up their first showcase booth right now. They’ve got the build, they’ve got the hardware, and they’ve completely forgotten to print the control scheme.

Don’t be that developer. Print the control scheme. Bring the candy. Stand in front of the table.

And if you’ve got a story from your own showcase experience - the thing that went brilliantly wrong, the weird booth decoration that started every conversation, the publisher who stopped because of the tablecloth - I’d genuinely love to hear it. Comments are open.

And if you’ve got a story from your own showcase experience - the thing that went brilliantly wrong, the weird booth decoration that started every conversation, the publisher who stopped because of the tablecloth - I’d genuinely love to hear it. Comments are open.

Photo courtesy of Digital Dragons / Nordic Game

Game industry events like Nordic Game, GIC, DevGamm, Digital Dragons, or Gamescom Business are not conferences in the traditional sense. Yes, there are panels and talks. But the real reason most professionals attend isn’t the programming - it’s the density. Hundreds of people who are hard to reach by email are suddenly in the same building for three days. That’s the product. The question is how to use it well.

The answer is different depending on who you are and what you need. I’m going to go through the main participant types in detail, but first - the formats. Because understanding what’s available is the foundation of everything else.

The formats, explained properly

Meet2Match / B2B matchmaking

This is the backbone of most European industry events. Nordic Game, Digital Dragons, GIC, Gamescom Business, A Maze, DevGamm - all of them run some version of it. The basic mechanic: you create a profile, browse other attendees, send meeting requests, get matched, and show up to a table at an appointed time for a 20-30 minute conversation.

Sounds simple. In practice, there’s a lot of variation in how well it works - and most of that variation comes down to the quality of the profiles and the specificity of the requests.

A bad Meet2Match profile says something like “indie studio looking for publisher.” A good one tells you the game’s genre, platform, current development stage, estimated budget needed, comparable titles, and what kind of publishing deal they’re looking for. A bad meeting request is a mass-send to every publisher in the system. A good one is specific about why you’re reaching out to this particular company and what you want to discuss. Do a little research, write something personal to make an actual connection.

The platform itself varies by event. Digital Dragons, Nordic Game or Gamescom they all used many platforms in the past. Whatever the tool, use it thoroughly - most people don’t fill out their profiles properly, which means even a reasonably complete profile stands out. I use a data scraper to put all of those people into Google Sheets. I can see where the blanks are in the company descriptions and check manually if there is any fit. I found it to be better than clicking through M2M or any other platform, and I can filter out a ton of data to separate the leads I need.

A few tactical notes on Meet2Match that most people learn the hard way

• Start requesting meetings early. The best slots fill up fast, and popular publishers or investors can have their entire schedule booked before the event starts.

• Check your incoming requests as carefully as your outgoing ones. Some of the best meetings I’ve had were with people who reached out to me, not the other way around.

• Build buffer time into your schedule. Back-to-back Meet2Match for eight hours sounds productive. By hour five you’re reciting your pitch like a robot and absorbing nothing. Leave gaps. Use them to decompress, take notes from previous meetings, or have spontaneous conversations.

• Have a system for what happens after each meeting. Whether it’s a notes app, a notebook, or just consistent voice memos - you need to capture context immediately. By the end of day two, meetings blur together. “The guy with the racing game” could be three different people. I personally still struggle with this one, and try new things to make it easier and less time-consuming. The method that works the best for me is using tags - studio name, person name, genre, needs, next steps.

Pitching sessions

• Pitching sessions are more structured than Meet2Match - usually a dedicated track where developers present to a panel of publishers or investors, with a formal time limit and moderated Q&A. Some events run these as competitive sessions where the best pitch wins something. Others are purely informational.

• The value varies significantly depending on the curation. A well-run pitching session with pre-screened participants and relevant publishers in the room is one of the most valuable things at an event. A poorly run one is a series of awkward presentations to publishers who don’t work in that genre, followed by generic feedback.

• Before you apply to a pitching session, find out who the judges or publishers in the room will be. If that information isn’t publicly available, ask the organizers. “I want to make sure my project is relevant to the attendees” is a completely reasonable question and any decent event organizer will answer it.

• If you’re pitching: the time limit is real, so practice. Not practicing your pitch at an event is like showing up to a job interview without preparing answers. You know what questions are coming - there are maybe eight standard publisher questions and you’ve seen them all before. Prepare for them.

If you’re on the receiving end: the game you see might not be the right fit, but the developer in front of you is a real person who has worked hard on this for months or years. How you conduct yourself in that room matters.

I’ll get back to this with a specific story in the indie developer section.

Indie showcases

Most mid-to-large events have a showcase floor where developers can set up a station and let people play their game. This is structurally different from Meet2Match or pitching - it’s inbound rather than outbound. You set up, you play host, and you see who comes to you.

The obvious value is press coverage and community building. But for business development purposes, the showcase floor is underrated because of who wanders past. Publishers scouting for games. Investors doing a round of the floor. Platform holders looking for exclusives or partnerships. Journalists who might write about you, or not, but who might introduce you to someone who matters.

The mistake most developers make at showcases is treating them purely as a demo opportunity and not as a networking opportunity. Someone stops, plays for five minutes, looks genuinely interested - that’s a conversation starter. Have something to hand them. Know what your ask is.

One tactical note: if you’re at a showcase and a publisher rep stops by, they may not have a meeting slot for you in their formal schedule. But they just played your game. That’s a warm introduction. Ask for a card and follow up specifically - “you played the game at the showcase, here’s what I’d want to discuss in a proper conversation.”

Mixers and networking drinks

Every event has at least one official networking mixer - usually an evening event, drinks included, standing around in a venue with a hundred other people trying to remember names. They’re chaotic and often loud and not ideal for complex conversations.

But they’re where a lot of the real event happens.

• Mixers strip away the formality of scheduled meetings. You’re not a developer and a publisher in a B2B context. You’re two people at a bar. Conversations start differently, go to different places, and often end with something more useful than a formal meeting would have produced. I’ve met a Head of Studio at Kojima Productions casually waiting for my drink and got pranked into thinking he’s an indie developer from Japan doing mostly walking-sims - which is correct, if you think of it :)

• The practical approach to mixers: don’t stand with the people you already know. That’s comfortable and useless. Identify two or three specific people you want to talk to before you arrive. Find them early. And have a one-sentence answer to “what are you working on” that’s interesting enough to keep the conversation going, but not so long it sounds like a pitch.

• Also: listen more than you talk. Most people at mixers are looking for an opportunity to tell someone about what they’re doing. Being the person who asks good questions and actually pays attention is rarer than it should be, and it’s memorable. And people looooooove talking about themselves or their precious projects.

After parties

After parties come in two varieties: official, which are extensions of the mixer format but later and louder, and unofficial, which are someone’s dinner reservation that became a table of twelve, or a studio’s private event, or a bar where everyone ended up after the official thing closed.

• The unofficial after parties are often better. They’re smaller, which means conversations go deeper. They’re self-selected, which means everyone there wanted to be there. And they’re where the relationships that started at the mixer get followed up properly. Another plus is that there are fewer people so it might be easier to reach someone who wasn’t available to schedule in M2M or any other way. Go get them tiger!

• How do you find out about after parties? Ask people. “What are you doing later?” is a perfectly normal question at an industry event. If you’ve had a good conversation during the day, invite them to join you for dinner. The games industry runs on genuine human relationships, and those get built over food and drinks more often than at scheduled meetings. It’s a cultural thing - many important events and decisions are made over food and drinks in a semi-formal environment. On my very own wedding, one of the guests made a million-dollar deal while waiting to use the bathroom. You never know!

• One note on stamina: you don’t have to go to everything. By day two of a three-day event, some people are running on fumes. A bad after party on Thursday night will hurt your Friday. Know your limits and use your energy where it counts. On the other hand, if you see someone you want to be friends with or keep them closer for future opportunities, bring them coffee, ask if they’re alive or compliment their karaoke skills. Be human!

Panels, talks, and keynotes

Most professionals use these as breaks between meetings. That’s fine, but there’s a networking angle worth considering.

Before a panel, you often know who’s sitting around you - you can see their badge. If someone you’ve been trying to meet is in the same row, that’s a low-pressure moment to introduce yourself. After a panel, the speaker is usually accessible for ten to fifteen minutes before the next session. Most people at a conference see the speaker as untouchable. They’re not. “I thought what you said about X was interesting - I have a slightly different view from my experience in Y” is a conversation opener, not an interruption.

The talk itself can also tell you things. How a publisher rep frames the challenges they’re seeing tells you a lot about what they’re looking for. A platform holder’s keynote about where they’re investing signals what kind of games they want. Good listeners take notes. Great listeners take notes and figure out what the subtext means.

If you’re an indie developer

Let me be direct about something first: going to an industry event as an indie developer, especially for the first time, is intimidating. You’re surrounded by people who seem to know everyone, who speak in industry shorthand, who have schedules packed with meetings while you’re hoping someone will respond to your requests.

That feeling is normal. And it gets better - but only if you put yourself in situations where it can.

Before the event

• Your work starts well before you get on the plane. Research which publishers are attending. Not all publishers - the ones who have published games like yours. Look at their recent releases, their stated acquisition criteria, their public statements about what they’re looking for. Build a short list of five to ten companies where there’s a genuine fit.

• Send targeted meeting requests. One sentence about your game. One sentence about why you’re reaching out to them specifically. One clear ask - “I’d like to show you a demo and get your feedback” is better than “I’d like to discuss potential partnerships.”

• Prepare your materials. A short pitch deck (ten slides maximum). A playable demo if you have one - on a laptop you control, not a link you’re hoping they’ll click on later. A one-page fact sheet with the key information. Leave-behind materials that have your contact details on them.

• And prepare your pitch verbally. Practice it out loud. Not in your head - out loud, in front of another person if possible. The first time you say “our game is like Expedition 33 meets Cyberpunk but set during the period of cold war in Poland” it will sound strange. By the fifth time it will sound natural. You want it to sound natural by the time you’re in the meeting.

During meetings

The most common mistake indie developers make in publisher meetings is talking too much. You have twenty minutes. The publisher needs to understand the game in the first five. If you’re ten minutes in and still setting up the context, you’ve lost them.

• Lead with the hook. Genre, platform, comparable titles, what makes it different, current stage, what you’re looking for. Then show the demo or the deck. Pick just one. Going through a pitch deck might not leave time for actually playing the demo. If you showcase the demo first, the pitch deck can be sent later - they already saw what the game is about. Then ask what questions they have.

• Pay attention to what publishers ask. The questions they ask tell you what matters to them. If they immediately ask about monetisation, that tells you something about their model. If they ask about team size and whether you’ve shipped before, they’re assessing risk. If they ask about the story and the world, they care about narrative. These are signals you can use to calibrate the conversation.

• When a meeting isn’t going the way you hoped - and some won’t - don’t let it become a disaster of awkward silence and polite nodding. Ask directly: “It sounds like this might not be the right fit - can I ask what’s missing for you?” That question gets you useful information. It also shows maturity, which publishers remember.

And before you leave any meeting, even a bad one, ask two questions. “What would need to be different about this project for it to be interesting to you?” And - if it feels appropriate - “Is there anyone at this event you’d recommend I speak to?” The second question is the more valuable one. A warm introduction from someone the other person trusts is worth ten cold meeting requests.

I want to tell you a specific story here because I think it illustrates something important about how to approach these situations.

When I was working on the publisher side, I sat through a lot of pitching sessions. Most developers come in alone or with a colleague. One time, a young developer came in with his game - and his father.

The father ran his own businesses, unrelated to games. He’d clearly come along to support his son, maybe because the son was nervous, maybe because the father wanted to understand what his kid was doing with his life. He sat quietly through the entire pitch, watching, taking it in.

After we’d gone through the game and the son had handled the questions as best he could, the father spoke. He gave his son feedback from a pure business perspective - about the structure of the pitch, about how he’d handled objections, about what the “ask” was and whether it had been clear. I was stunned in a very positive way.

I added my own feedback. About the game specifically - what was working mechanically, what the market context looked like, what the pitch would have needed to land differently. The developer wrote everything down. Not on his phone - in an actual notebook. He asked follow-up questions. He thanked us both and left.

He didn’t sign a deal. But he left that room with more useful, actionable information than most developers get from ten meetings combined. Because he was genuinely open to feedback, he asked for it explicitly, and he received it without getting defensive.

That attitude - “I’m here to learn as much as I’m here to close” - is the right frame for your first several events. Maybe longer than that.

Indie showcases as an indie developer

If you have a playable build, get a showcase slot if the event offers one. Even if you’re primarily there for business meetings.

The showcase gets you in front of people who aren’t in your meeting schedule. It gives you something to point people to when you meet them - “come play it, stand three is in the back left.” It gives press an easy way to cover you. And it gets you real, unfiltered reactions to the game from strangers, which is its own form of market research. It’s also a free QA. I cannot stress how many times I went back to the company with several cases to reproduce and fix.

Stand at your station, not behind it. Make eye contact with people passing. “Want to try it?” is enough of an opener. Some people will say no. Many will say yes. The ones who play for more than a minute and then start asking questions are the ones to talk to properly.

After parties as an indie developer

Go to them. Even if you’re tired. Especially if you’re tired and your schedule was light.

The formal meeting structure at events disadvantages smaller developers. Publishers with full schedules won’t always have a Meet2Match slot for you. But they’ll be at the mixer. They’ll be at the after party. And a conversation that starts “I was the one pitching the Expedition 33 and Cyberpunk mix game earlier” is a very different conversation than a cold meeting request.

If you’re a mid-size or AA/AAA developer

Your event experience is different in almost every way. You probably have a publishing deal, or you’re not looking for one. You’re not pitching for survival - you’re maintaining relationships, doing competitive intelligence, talking to platform holders, maybe looking for co-development partners or technology vendors.

The structured formats matter less for you than for indie developers. Your value is in the corridor. The dinner with a platform holder rep you’ve known for five years. The conversation at the mixer with the head of business development at a studio you might want to work with someday. The panel where you finally meet in person someone you’ve only emailed.

What you’re actually there to do

• Relationship maintenance. The games industry has a remarkably small core. The same few hundred people show up at Nordic Game, Gamescom, GIC, and Digital Dragons every year. Keeping those relationships warm - not just when you need something, but consistently - is what networking actually means at this level.

• Competitive intelligence. What games are getting buzz on the showcase floor this year? Which publishers seem to have a lot of meetings and which seem quiet? Who’s hiring aggressively, and for what roles? Who’s not at the event this year that usually is? All of this is signal.

• Platform relationships. If you have games on console platforms, events are where you maintain those relationships face to face. Platform holder reps are often easier to reach at events than through normal channels. Use that access.

• Talent scouting. Mid-to-large studios are always looking for people. Industry events are full of talented people between jobs, unhappy at their current studio, or open to something new. You don’t have to be crass about it - just keep your eyes open and your conversations genuine. I myself met my last boss at one of these events, and a simple follow up on LinkedIn landed me a role.

What you shouldn’t do

• Don’t spend the whole event only talking to people you already know. It’s comfortable and unproductive.

• Don’t skip the informal formats because your schedule is full of formal meetings. The best intelligence comes from unstructured conversation, not scheduled ones.

• Don’t treat junior developers or first-time attendees as not worth your time. The person with the indie game and no publisher today might be making something you want to work on in three years. The assistant who took notes in every meeting at GIC this year is going to be a senior producer somewhere in five years. Treat people consistently, not according to their current status.

If you’re a publisher

You’re the most sought-after person at the event. Every developer wants a meeting. Your Meet2Match slots will fill up completely, and you’ll get requests from people who haven’t done basic research about what you publish. By day two you’ll be exhausted and your pitch reception quality will have declined significantly.

Here’s what good publisher behavior at events looks like.

Managing your schedule

• Be deliberate about what you accept. Yes, your schedule will be full - but full of the right meetings or full of whoever applied? It matters. Spend time before the event reviewing incoming requests and prioritising the ones that seem like genuine fits. Decline politely but clearly the ones that aren’t.

• Build real breaks into your schedule. Not “lunch at a different table with different people.” Actual breaks where you’re not performing. You’ll have better conversations in the meetings you do take.

In the meetings

• Listen before you evaluate. Let the developer show you the game before you form a conclusion. The number of publishers I’ve seen who clearly decided “no” in the first two minutes and then spent eighteen minutes visibly waiting for it to end is embarrassing. Even if you know it’s a pass, the meeting has started - be present in it.

• Be honest early. If you can see in the first five minutes that this isn’t a fit, say so. “I can see this is a polished project, but we’re not actively looking for games in this genre right now” is a complete sentence. It respects the developer’s time and yours. It’s far kinder than letting them pitch for twenty minutes to a publisher who checked out before the demo started. I’d sooner apologize and maybe suggest another company and leave earlier, than pretend to have a genuine interest if the project is clearly too low quality or not a genre fit.

• Give specific feedback. “Not for us” is the beginning of a sentence, not the end of one. Why not? What would need to be different? Is the problem the game, the timing, the team, the stage of development? Specific feedback is valuable. Generic feedback is noise.

One more thing about feedback: give it without condescension. You’ve seen a hundred games this week. They’ve made this one for the last two years. The power differential is real. Use it to help, not to perform.

A note on long-term thinking

The developer whose game you pass on today might make something exceptional in four years. The way you treated them at this meeting will influence whether they come to you with it. Publishers with reputations for being fair, honest, and respectful in pass situations get first looks at the best projects. That’s not an accident.

Your reputation at events is built meeting by meeting, year by year. People talk. The games industry has a long memory. And you’re not as anonymous as you might think. Don’t be that guy who just wants to have pictures with everyone, but we all know hasn’t delivered anything in years

If you’re an investor

Almost everything in the publisher section applies. You’re evaluating deals, you’re managing a full schedule, and you have the power in most of the conversations you’re having.

A few things specific to the investor context:

• Be clear about what you actually invest in. The number of investor meetings where the first ten minutes are a developer trying to figure out whether this person invests in games at all, or at what stage, or with what ticket size, is absurd. Have a clear and accessible profile. State your thesis. It saves everyone’s time.

• The decision to pass is also a service. A clear, early, honest “this isn’t for our fund because X” is genuinely useful to a developer. They can cross you off their list and move on to the right investors faster. Dragging out a process you know is going nowhere is not kindness - it’s discomfort management on your part and a pain in the butt if you’ll get dragged in countless emails after the event.

• Drop the performance. Some investors at events seem to be there to be seen as investors more than to actually do deals. They drop fund names, they speak in jargon, they make developers feel like they should be grateful for the audience. It’s unimpressive to anyone who has been around long enough. The investors I’ve seen do the most interesting deals at events are the ones who ask simple questions, listen carefully, and treat developers like adults.

• Give back something real. If a game isn’t right for you, but you have specific expertise - in market positioning, in fundraising, in a particular platform or genre - offer it. One or two concrete observations from someone experienced costs you five minutes and can genuinely change how a developer thinks about their project. The reputation you build by being that person is worth more than any short-term advantage you gain by keeping your cards close.

If you’re a service provider - PR, influencer marketing, QA, localisation, co-development

You’re in a structurally awkward position at most industry events, and it’s worth being honest about that.

Most of the networking formats at game industry events are designed around developer-to-publisher or developer-to-investor relationships. If you’re a PR agency or an influencer marketing studio or a QA house, the formal structures often don’t serve you well. Meet2Match profiles are optimised for developers seeking publishing. Pitching sessions aren’t for you.

Showcase floors are quite tricky, and I have my own experience with these. A project that is looking for a publisher now might realize that having 150k wishlists means they’d be better off self-publishing and hiring an agency. Take a card, ask when they want to release, follow up 3-6 months before launch, asking for an update (check their Steam page first - maybe there’s still no publisher listed there).

Your event is the informal one.

What actually works

• Being genuinely useful in conversation before you’re useful commercially. If you run influencer marketing campaigns, have an informed opinion about what’s working right now in the market and be willing to share it without a pitch attached. If you’re in PR, know which outlets are actively covering which types of games and be able to give a developer real, specific information about their options. If you do localisation, know which markets are growing and which languages are underserved for the genres you work in.

• People hire service providers they trust. Trust gets built by demonstrating knowledge that helps them, not by handing out decks.

The positioning that works best for service providers at events is something like: I’m not here to sell you anything, I’m here to be a useful person to know. When you need what I offer, you’ll know where to find me.

The mixer is your office

• If the formal formats don’t serve you well, the informal ones do. Mixers, after parties, dinners, the coffee queue before a morning panel. These are where you build the relationships that turn into client conversations later.

• The bar is different here too. You’re not trying to close anything at the event. You’re trying to be in the right conversations so that when someone needs PR three months from now, or influencer marketing for their launch, or QA before they go gold, your name is the one that comes up.

On pitching your services

Don’t lead with what you offer. Lead with what they need. If a developer is telling you about their upcoming launch and they mention they haven’t figured out press coverage yet, that’s the moment for “that’s actually an area I work in - happy to share some thoughts if useful.” Not “we have a five-tier PR package that includes...”

The hard sell doesn’t work in a relationship business. The games industry is a relationship business.

The stuff that applies to everyone, regardless of who you are

Be a human being.

This sounds obvious. At events, under the pressure of schedules and deal-making and the performance of professional competence, it’s surprisingly easy to forget.

The person across the table from you at a pitching session, or in a Meet2Match meeting, or at a mixer - they’re a real person with real stakes in how this conversation goes. Maybe they’ve flown here from another country. Maybe this is their first event. Maybe this is their fifth year attending and they’re exhausted and wondering if it’s worth it. None of that changes whether you’re polite and decent and honest with them.

The best networkers I’ve seen at events aren’t the most aggressive or the most well-connected. They’re the people who make everyone they talk to feel like the conversation was worthwhile. That’s the thing that gets you remembered. That’s what builds a real network rather than a list of LinkedIn connections.

Take notes and follow up.

The number of meetings that end with “let’s stay in touch” and are never followed up on is staggering. Don’t be that person.

Within 24 hours of a meeting that went somewhere, send a specific follow-up. Not “great to meet you” - reference something specific from the conversation. “You mentioned you were looking at games with a strong Eastern European narrative - I thought of [specific thing] when you said that, wanted to share it.” That level of specificity tells them you were actually listening.

For meetings that didn’t go anywhere, it’s still worth a brief follow-up if there was any genuine connection. “Thanks for the honest feedback on the pitch - I’m going to work on X based on what you said” is a response that most publishers and investors remember positively.

Manage your energy.

• Events are a marathon, not a sprint. The most valuable meetings often happen on the last day, when schedules open up and people are more relaxed. If you’ve burned yourself out by the second evening, you won’t be there for them.

• It’s okay to skip a mixer. It’s okay to eat dinner alone. It’s okay to go to bed early. The goal isn’t to attend everything - it’s to be present and useful in the conversations you do have.

The follow-up is where the event actually happens.

I’ve said this before but it bears repeating. Events create the context for relationships. The relationships themselves get built afterward - in email threads, in video calls, in the slow accumulation of “we keep running into each other and the conversations keep being good.”

The value of an event is proportional to what you do with it after you get home. Clear your head, go through your notes, and actually do the things you said you’d do. Every person who said they’d send you something and didn’t is a small erosion of trust. Every person who followed through exactly as promised is a small deposit into a relationship that might matter a lot someday.

I’ll be at Digital Dragons 2026 this week. If you’re there - come find me. I’ll be the one with strong opinions about all of the above and a genuine interest in what you’re working on.

And if you’re not there this year: pick one event in the next twelve months, prepare properly, and go. The games industry is small and warm and weird and full of people who are genuinely happy to talk about what they do. You just have to show up.

Several years in games. Developer side, publisher side, agency side. I’ve pitched games to publishers, I’ve been the one sitting across the table receiving pitches, and I’ve run PR campaigns for both. I co-host a podcast called InputLag - we’ve been talking about games and the industry for over a decade now.

At some point I noticed I had things to say that didn’t fit anywhere. Too specific for a podcast. Too long for a LinkedIn post. Too opinionated for a press release. Stuff I’d tell someone over a beer at Gamescom but never wrote down.

This is where I’m writing it down.

Why this, why now?

The industry is having a rough few years and a lot of the coverage doesn’t quite make sense to me. Not because it’s wrong - but because it’s missing context. Studios close and nobody explains what the publishing deal actually looked like. A mid-tier game bombs and the headline is about the genre, not the release strategy. A publisher shifts focus and the analysis is about market trends, not about what that means for the 12 studios currently in their pipeline.

I’m not a journalist. I’m not breaking news. I’m giving you the read from someone who’s been in some of these rooms, or at least knows people who have. I love to network and I’m proud to have a vast web of contacts I can always reach for advice.

What should you care?

I write about the industry from several angles - publishing deals and what makes them work or fail, PR and how games actually get coverage, the developer perspective on things publishers rarely see, what’s really happening in the market beyond the headlines, and the conference circuit from the business side rather than the press side.

Everything is free and lands in your inbox.

Who this is for?

People who work in games. People who want to. Developers trying to understand the business side of what they’re building. PR folks who want a perspective from someone who’s been pitched at and done the pitching. Anyone in the industry who reads the news and keeps thinking: “okay, but what does this actually mean?”

If that’s you - glad you’re here.

One ask: if something lands, forward it to one person who works in games. That’s the only growth strategy I have.

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