So You’re Thinking About Starting a Game Studio?
A few reflections on what decades in the trenches have taught me about founding game studios.
Low-res
Starting your own studio requires a dedicated mindset: fast decisions are yours to make, and you must stay focused on both creativity and business from day one.
The founding team matters more than any concept; aligned ambition, defined responsibilities, and a solid shareholders’ agreement are essential.
A studio pitch needs strategy, not just a game idea. Partners want to understand what kind of company you intend to build and how you plan to operate beyond the first project.
Funding takes longer than most founders expect. Showing progress becomes your credibility, and ambition must match your position and runway.
Early momentum comes from sharing your pitch widely, building something playable as soon as you can, testing it with real players, and learning from every cycle.
Hi-res
“What if I started something of my own?”
The question never fully goes away. I’ve been in this industry for almost thirty years, founded several studios, sold them, run a public company, and invested in dozens of teams, and I still feel the pull. There’s something about building from nothing, with people you trust, that no other work quite matches.
The games industry is in a complicated moment. Many companies are downsizing or closing entire teams. People who never imagined themselves as founders suddenly put the idea on the table. It’s a mix of circumstance and curiosity. One door closes, another cracks open, and the question appears.
For anyone newly laid off, the months ahead can feel disorienting. Yet this is also when people do some of their best thinking. With the right mindset and the right partners, the idea of starting a studio goes from a defensive reaction to a deliberate choice. It can be the most rewarding decision of your career.
If you take the plunge, it will not be easy. Investors still see the potential of games but many struggle to read the business risk. Publishers behave the same way. Strong teams can succeed, though they now need a sharper pitch and a more grounded plan than ever before.
The Mindset Shift: From Developer to Founder
Most developers who start a studio underestimate how much their mindset needs to change. You step out of an environment with structure, pipelines, leadership layers, and institutional support. Overnight you become responsible for all of it.
I’ve seen this transition many times, both in my own journey and while evaluating studios as an investor. The people who struggle most are often the most experienced—they’ve spent years in large organizations where decisions moved through layers, where someone else watched the budget, where specialization was rewarded. None of that prepares you for a five-person team where everything is everyone’s problem.
“We need to check that with HQ” is often a death sentence to any game project. That one sentiment embodies so much of the inefficiency in our industry. It dilutes ownership and creates what I call a culture of waiting. In a small studio, no one else is coming to make the call. You are HQ.
The opposite looks like this: “That sounds interesting. Let’s implement it and try it at next week’s playtest.” Someone took an immediate decision and anchored it to validation. Fast and disciplined. That’s the rhythm a small studio needs to survive. Efficiency needs to become your unique selling point.
Another shift comes from understanding that creativity and business are no longer separate concerns. When I founded Massive Entertainment, none of us had run a company before. Our first game scored 86 on Metacritic—a genuine success by any creative measure. And not long after launch, we had to let go of two-thirds of our team because we had no funding plan for what came next. The game worked. The business nearly didn’t.
That experience taught me something I’ve carried ever since: watch the cash. Think beyond the project. The creative vision matters, but it doesn’t pay salaries when the runway runs out.
In short, you are building your company, as well as a game. Both need attention from day one.
Aligning With the Right Co-Founders
The founding team sets the tone for everything that follows: how decisions are made, how conflict is handled, how ambition is interpreted, and how the company evolves once things get difficult. Talent matters, but alignment matters more.
Starting with people you’ve worked with before is often a strength. You’ve seen each other under pressure, you understand each other’s habits, and investors appreciate teams with shared history. But familiarity isn’t enough. A founding team needs a mix of capabilities that covers the creative, technical, production, and commercial sides of the business. One person can cover several, but none can be ignored.
Just as important is clarity about who owns which decisions. At Planeto, my co-founder was the CTO—responsible for architecture, platform choices, and leading development. Creative and business strategy sat with me. We had tension occasionally, but we often resolved it quickly because we knew whose call it was. Without that clarity, small disagreements can become existential.
Ambition also needs to match. Some people dream of a five-person studio that runs sustainably for years. Others want to raise millions and chase global growth. Neither is wrong, but they are incompatible. Misaligned ambition is one of the most common sources of co-founder conflict I’ve seen—and it often doesn’t surface until the company is already underway. The same is true for creative direction. If the founders disagree about what kind of games the studio should make, that fracture will widen under pressure.
Finally, put it in writing. A shareholders’ agreement clarifies roles, voting rights, vesting, and what happens if someone leaves. Many founders avoid this conversation because it feels confrontational. In reality, it’s an act of respect. You’re aiming to build something profound together. Treat it with the care it deserves.
Strategy Before the First Game
Most founders begin with a game idea. The spark comes from a mechanic they want to explore, a genre they wish existed, or a frustration with how certain games are made. But anyone you pitch to—investors, publishers, or senior hires—will eventually ask the same question: what is the long-term plan?
During my time as an investor at Nordisk Games and Behold Ventures, we saw this pattern repeatedly. Talented teams would walk in with a compelling game concept and a clear funding ask. But when we asked about the company they wanted to build, most had no answer. They had a game pitch, not a company pitch. We often ended up passing, not because the games were weak, but because the teams hadn’t thought beyond their first project.
The teams that get it right talk differently: about subsequent projects, about what kind of games they want to excel at—not just “great games,” but a specific creative territory they intend to own. Their first game is one part of the deck, not the whole story.
This isn’t a corporate exercise. Strategy is a practical tool for early decisions. It shapes team composition, funding ambition, production scope, and how you position the studio in every conversation.
A clear strategy makes it much easier for potential partners to believe in you. It answers the question every investor is silently asking: why will this team still exist in five years?
Funding Reality and Level of Ambition
The funding environment for game studios has tightened considerably. Many investors still believe in the potential of games, yet hesitate because they find it difficult to assess risk in the current climate. Publishers face the same uncertainty. For new founders, this means two things: raising money takes longer than you expect, and the bar for clarity is higher than ever.
Most first-time founders underestimate the timeline. From deciding you want to start a studio to actually receiving funding can take a year or more—if it happens at all. That period requires savings, side work, or a very understanding family. Build that reality into your planning from the start.
Founders with well-known track records can still raise based on reputation. But most teams cannot rely on that. If you are senior but not a household name, your funding ambition needs to reflect where you’re starting from. You will earn trust step by step.
There are two broad funding paths: equity investment and project financing. Neither is inherently better, but they have different dynamics that founders often misunderstand.
Equity investors take an ownership stake and have a long-term interest in seeing the whole company succeed. But taking their money means you’re suddenly responsible for other people’s capital—not just to make a game, but to build a commercially successful business. You’re in the driver’s seat, but others will want to be included and involved. Experienced investors can be invaluable partners: they help with your funding journey, open doors, and share your long-term agenda. But they also expect significant returns. If you’re looking to build a lifestyle business—decent salaries for the founders, a sustainable but modest company—regular VC investors are the wrong fit. Your agendas will not just diverge, they will collide.
Project financing, typically from publishers, works differently. The publisher has no ownership stake, so their interest is narrower: can you deliver the game you’ve agreed on, on time, on budget? This can fund your first project if the production plan holds, but it doesn’t sustain any runway beyond that release. And critically, publisher deals often require giving up some or all of your IP rights, whereas equity funding lets you keep them—and IP is where most long-term value lies.
Whatever path you pursue, your tenacity and ability to tell a clear, persuasive story is essential. Fundraising is a sales process. Many developers have never needed that skill, but it becomes central when pitching your studio. Every meeting sharpens your message. Every rejection teaches you something. Your pitch should evolve constantly as you learn what resonates and what falls flat.
Raising money is challenging, but teams with clear strategies, grounded budgets, and focused prototypes increase their chances of success. The key is ambition that matches your reality and a willingness to refine your story until it lands.
Efficiency as Your Competitive Edge
New studios are almost always resource constrained. They win by moving with a level of speed and engagement that larger organizations struggle to match. A small team can react to the consequences of its decisions immediately. You can shift priorities without waiting for alignment processes or approval chains. That immediacy needs to become your momentum.
But efficiency isn’t only about size. When we made World in Conflict at Massive, the team grew from 30 to 130 people over two years. That’s not a small studio. Yet we shipped a game that scored 89 on Metacritic, on schedule. What made that possible was a core leadership team who had both the responsibility and the mandate to make decisions. We combined that with weekly playtesting that validated good ideas and weeded out bad ones at pace. The feedback loop stayed tight even as the team scaled.
Engagement plays a similar role. In a small studio, everyone sees how their work affects the whole. People take ownership because the impact is visible. This level of involvement is difficult to maintain in larger organizations where responsibility is distributed and teams operate in narrow lanes. Early studios thrive when every person feels accountable for the outcome, not just their slice of it.
A new studio has few natural advantages. Efficiency is the one you can control. The sooner you embrace that, the stronger your foundation becomes.
Build, Test, and Share Early
One of the most common mistakes founders make is waiting too long before putting something in front of others. The instinct is understandable. You want the pitch or prototype to feel representative. You want to avoid judgment until you’re ready. The problem is that waiting delays the information you need most.
An early prototype is a tool for learning. The sooner you build something playable, the sooner you see what players grasp immediately, what confuses them, and where the fun actually sits. None of this appears in internal conversations or design documents. It only shows up once people touch the game.
At Massive, we eventually learned to playtest constantly. The feedback was often difficult to hear, but always valuable. We didn’t look for praise or solutions. We wanted to know what wasn’t working. Playtesters surface the problems; your creativity and experience figure out the fixes.
The same principle applies to pitching your studio. No one is going to steal your idea. Sharing your concept widely forces you to articulate it clearly. It also increases your chances of finding collaborators, publishers, or investors. Fundraising is a numbers game. You will need dozens, or sometimes hundreds, of conversations before someone commits. Each meeting is an opportunity to sharpen your pitch.
Early studios gain momentum by building something, testing it, showing it, and repeating the cycle relentlessly. The clarity you gain will guide your decisions far more reliably than speculation or internal debate.
Take the Plunge
Starting a studio is a huge commitment. It asks for energy, patience, and a willingness to learn at a pace that can feel relentless. Progress will feel fragile at times, even for the strongest teams. Yet people still do it, and many look back on those early years as the most meaningful work of their careers.
I count myself among them. The years building Massive and Planeto—despite the near-bankruptcy, despite the layoffs, despite all the moments I was worried we’d fail—remain the most formative of my professional life. Everything mattered. Every decision had significance. Every person counted. That intensity is hard to find inside a large organization.
There is no perfect moment to begin. Circumstances rarely line up neatly. What matters is whether you have people you trust, a strategy that gets you excited, and a mindset that allows you to handle the uncertainty ahead.
To be clear, this essay is far from comprehensive. Starting a studio involves much more than any short piece can cover: legal structures, team building, production methodologies, market positioning, and a hundred other things you’ll learn along the way. But hopefully these reflections spark some inspiration and curiosity.
Even if the journey doesn’t end the way you hope, you will come out stronger. You learn how companies work. You learn how games are built without the safety net of a large organization. You learn how to pitch, how to prioritize, and how to make decisions that ripple across an entire team. Those lessons stay with you, and they open doors you didn’t expect.
If you feel the pull toward starting something, take it seriously. Explore it carefully. And if the pieces align, take the plunge. I hope it becomes the most rewarding chapter of your professional life. 😊
This essay is part of my ongoing series, Connecting the Pixels, where I explore how technology, creativity, and culture intersect in the future of interactive entertainment.