Biz Dev Quest

On the fifth episode of Biz Dev Quest, I am joined by Pontus "Zlapped" Mähler, Director of Business Development at Global Top Round. Pontus started out as a pro player of Heroes of Newerth, before creating his own eSports team, helping with the design of various games and eventually becoming Director of Business Development at GTR. In a lot of ways this episodes really encapsulates what Biz Dev Quests is all about, which is highlighting people's personal quests through life. We touched on his eSports days, volunteering, investing and what the future holds. It's a really rich episode which makes me consider making future episodes longer.

On the fourth episode of Biz Dev Quest I am joined by Theresa Duringer, CEO at Temple Gates Games. Theresa has worked at Maxis/EA and is currently leading Temple Gates Games, makers of many succesful board game adaptations such as Race for the Galaxy, Shards of Infinity and the upcoming Roll for the Galaxy. This has been a really interesting and fascinating episode to record, as Theresa is the first guest on the podcast I didn't previously know personally. Theresa is also the first developer guest on the show and we took a dive together in talking about the struggles of running a studio in such crazy times as well as various topics including how a deal for a board game adaptation happens. I'm a particular fan of this episode and I hope you will enjoy it too.

On the third episode of Biz Dev Quest I am joined by Christopher Wulf, Publishing Director at Those Awesome Guys. Christopher was formerly in charge of Developer Relations for Indie MEGABOOTH and since last year he's joined Those Awesome Guys, a small independent development and publishing studio that is known for games such as Move or Die, Monster Prom and the upcoming Floppy Knights. This was a really interesting conversation that started with talking about what makes a great pitch deck and that evolved into many different topics such as ways to break into the industry, what it means to be a young developer, how the Coronavirus is gonna change the industry and the origin story of The Hat.

On the second episode of Biz Dev Quest, I am joined by the Director of Publishing of Frontier Developments, Zac Antonaci. Zac comes from a background in community management and PR at Frontier and Jagex. Frontier Developments is a British developer/publisher that is known for games such as Planet Coaster, Jurassic World Evolution and Elite Dangerous. It was a really great conversation about what drives the decisions inside a big company like Frontier, PR and community management, IP based titles and how Jurassic World Evolution came to be.

On the very first episode of Biz Dev Quest, I am joined by the Co-founder and CEO of Playdigious, Xavier Liard. Xavier entered the video game industry by establishing DotEmu in 2007, a game developer and publisher dedicated into retro-gaming. In 2014, he  sold DotEmu and established Playdigious, a game publishing company that most notably worked on the mobile version of Dead Cells, Cultist Simulator, Evoland and Mini Metro. We dive deep into the history of DotEmu, the founding of Playdigious and the tough decisions that surrounded AdTrial - Xavier's foray into the digital advertising world. This episode is packed with tips from Xavier on entrepreneurship and insight on business development and work-life balance. Towards the end of the episode we also touched on Apple Arcade and the impact it had on a publisher of premium mobile titles.