Rise and Play Podcast

In this episode, we interview Jens Begemann, the former co-founder and CEO of Wooga, the Berlin-based casual mobile games company behind the success of Diamond Dash, Jelly Splash, and June's Journey.

We cover Jen's journey in the gaming industry and the lessons he learned as an entrepreneur that led him to found Wooga in 2008. We also explore the growth of Wooga, its successful games, and the company's shift to mobile gaming. The conversation touches on the significance of company culture, hiring the right people, and the need for constant adaptation in the ever-changing gaming market. We discuss the difficult decisions and strategic mistakes made along the way, as well as the ultimate decision to sell Wooga to Playtika at the end of 2018. Today, when we observe the company's growth and revenues, Wooga is more successful than it has ever been.

Topics covered:

- Challenges faced in the dot-com bubble burst in 2000

- Importance of having a network and clear vision before starting a company

- Growth of Wooga and its early successful games Brain Buddies, Diamond Dash, Bubble Island, Jelly Splash, Pearl's Perils

- Shift from Facebook games to mobile games

- Importance of company culture and hiring the right people, from the start

- Challenges and mistakes made leading to a difficult year with layoffs in 2017

- Decision to sell Wooga to Playtika in 2018

- Why Playtika was the right choice for Wooga, post-acquisition

We say it is essential to build diverse teams for innovation, creativity, and performance. Diversity of individuals sounds great on paper, but how do we make it work as a team in practice? How do you make people who avoid confrontation collaborate with confrontational people? How do you lead a team in an egalitarian way while most of what they've known is hierarchical leadership?

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"There's a whole bunch of leaders out there who wake up every morning and put on a mask. They transform into their work selves, playing a role they think they're supposed to play. It's like they're living a double life. But let me tell you, it's not easy to keep up this charade.

Behind that mask, these leaders face some serious challenges. They can't catch a decent night's sleep, and anxiety weighs them down day in and day out. Their energy levels go up and down like a yo-yo, and they feel exhausted most of the time..." Steve Cuss.

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You just inherited or built a new team. You've made a mistake of judgment, communication, or decision with the team. Now, the team doesn't like you or trust you but you still need to achieve an outcome together. What do you do? How do you come back from that situation and rebuild trust? It is unfortunately a common leadership story in everyday business.

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In this episode, we deconstruct with Marina Barthélémy how to make sound financial decisions for your company when things are going well, instead of making those decisions when things are going wrong. Marina has an impressive track record in gaming and finance. She previously worked as the CFO at Amplitude Studios, which SEGA later acquired in 2016. Marina and her co-founder Arthur, recently launched their own gaming fund PixCapital, to support premium studios.

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Today is a special episode as we're witnessing an intimate leadership conversation between Maria Sayans and Daniel Gray, respectively CEO and Chief Creative Officer at Ustwo Games. What is it to be a leader at Ustwo Games?

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How do you build the perfect teams based on psychological and motivational traits? How do you create those magical teams at different stages of growth of a company? The people who brought you from 0 to 1 may not be the same ones who help you bring the company from 1 to 10. How do you update your human systems while scaling your company?

We will deconstruct in this episode those questions with Bastian Bergmann, co-founder at Solsten, using the human psychological lens on teams, processes, and culture.

It is difficult to launch and scale a new casual game these days. However, a few studios found a way to survive the turbulences of the market and become antifragile. Hear the business success story of FunCraft, a lean and small casual studio founded in 2019 by ex-EA and Zynga Product Leader Michael Martinez and his co-founder Jason McGuirk. Learn how after failing their first startup Juicebox, the two co-founders came back together to try again, taking the key learnings from the past: focus on rapid development and testing with a lean and experienced team, a discipline and commitment to investing only in the game with the best metrics.

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Thank you to our sponsor! Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠go.solsten.io⁠⁠⁠⁠ and mention Rise x Play for a demo and receive a free feature, theme, and art style study included with your Navigator purchase, a $20,000 value. Offer valid through 8/31/23.

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How often do we look back and share openly what led to a studio's closing? While we can learn from success, we can learn as much from failures. And we should, especially given how many studios are unfortunately closing these days.

In this episode previously streamed on 27.04 in partnership with Evolution Nordics, I will share my expertise on the principles of non-violent communication and how they can be applied in a leadership role.

What is the most fundamental human need: to be seen and recognized for who we are? When holding a management position, how is being yourself a realistic expectation?

We discuss in this new episode with Miska the limitations of being truly yourself as a leader. It is easier and even recommended to be yourself when you're part of a game team (i.e. Product Manager, Producer), to build trust and connection with your team. When you are in a management role (i.e. CEO/C-level/VP, Game Director), your title precedes you, and being too much "yourself" can have damaging consequences for people and create an environment of anxiety.

Here are some pitfalls: revealing strategic information in the wrong timing or context, saying something that will be misinterpreted, or saying a bad joke.

------------------------------ Thank you to our sponsor! Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠go.solsten.io⁠⁠⁠⁠ and mention Rise x Play for a demo and receive a free feature, theme, and art style study included with your Navigator purchase, a $20,000 value. Offer valid through 8/31/23. -------------------------------

We will share in this episode several frameworks of communication: Layer your communication with different groups and audiences. Be close and yourself with the people you need to be close to (your core team), not everyone in the company. Accept being disliked for your image, not for who you truly are. You are not a Lead to be liked. You are a Lead to make the right (and unpopular) decisions for the long-term benefit of the company and team.

How did you start your career in games? Did you also think that working hard, hustling, and reaching "success" at work would bring happiness and fulfillment? How do you reflect on those earlier years of sacrifice for work, that you will never get back? Hear the candid and personal story of the successful Game Designer and Executive Producer Ethan Levy (ex-EP at N3twork and Bioware), also known for hosting The Deconstructor Of Fun podcast, who reflects on his career in games. Ethan shares what he wishes he knew before he began his career and the feeling of regret of sacrificing his personal life for work. Is it ever worth it in the end?

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Getting into an emotionally charged conversation at work is one of the most uncomfortable feelings. As a leader, you cannot really get away from it. You start to feel uncomfortable and anxious about the hard conversation you need to have (i.e. dismissal, reassignment, negative feedback, project canceled, conflict resolution...). Your report can feel it too, so everyone feels uncomfortable. It doesn't help to get anywhere.

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“Neurodiversity” explains the unique ways people's brains work. While everyone's brain develops similarly, no two brains function just alike. Being neurodivergent means having a brain that works differently from the average or “neurotypical” person. ADHD, Autism, Dyspraxia, Dyslexia, Dyscalculia, Dysgraphia, and Tourette's syndrome are all examples of neurodiverse conditions. They're diagnostic labels used to explain the diverse ways of thinking, learning, processing, and behaving.

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You know it, you need to drastically pivot your company otherwise it will go bankrupt. So, what do you do, and how? Nicolas Godement, Managing Director at Twin Sails (previously known as Asmodee Digital) shares the exciting transformation journey of a company that started as a board game IP publisher to a PC and console game publisher. When Nicolas joined the company in 2018 to support the CEO, the financials were not good, the team morale was low. How do you start with that?

Get the practical steps from Nicolas on how to pivot a company strategy, team, and branding. How do you accompany the teams throughout this uncomfortable phase? Those changes don't happen overnight if you want to them be sustainable. They usually take 2 to 3 years. Are you ready to lead that journey in your company?

What is the one thing that the best CEOs do? They manage themselves and their time, above all. It is easy to get distracted by the everyday buzz, people's requests, emergencies, and life in general. How do C-suite and Executives manage their time and life, to make sure they keep the focus on the few important things? Managing your time guarantees a healthier and more fulfilled life.

In this episode, Simonetta Lulli (CEO at GameHouse) and Ioana Hreninciuc (CPO at Homa, ex-CEO at Game Analytics) share their Monday routines and tools to ensure they stay on top of things. How do they make time for themselves, to think of the big picture? How do they juggle the demand of personal and professional life? How do they incorporate White Space into their daily routine?

You don't need to be a CEO to apply those discipline tools for yourself. But you can learn from successful CEOs!

UX design is still a misunderstood field in games. Therefore, it is hard to hire great UX designers who understand games or game designers who deeply understand UX. How do we solve this human and skills puzzle?

In this episode, Olga Marushchak, UX Director at King, will deconstruct what makes a great UX designer. Olga will share practical tools on how to hire and identify great UX designers, when you don't have internally the knowledge yourself. She will also prove that it is possible to hire UX designers without a prior experience in games if they demonstrate certain key skills. Last, how do you train your UX designers in games, once you found the One?

Olga has been working in Game Dev for almost 14 years and has worked in various gaming companies: AAA, small indie startups, and medium-sized organizations such as Playgendary and Wargaming.

In this new segment of Rise and Play, I sit down with my business partner Miska Katkoff, CEO at Savage Games, and the founder of Deconstructor of Fun In those episodes, we will share with Miska our reflection thoughts on our leadership work at Savage Games. What can you gain from being more Stoic as a leader? As leaders, we tend to believe that we are responsible for everything that happens around us: company outcomes, actions, and behavior of others. The reality is that we have very little control over what’s going on around us. It takes wisdom to know the difference between precisely what we have control over, and what we don’t. “Identify what you can change and what you cannot change. Accept the things you cannot change, and have the courage to act on the things you can change.” The only things you can really control are your perception and actions. So, how do you apply this to your day-to-day business and process of decision-making, especially tough decisions? That's what we will cover in this segment today!

Saara Bergström is the COO at Next Games, a Finnish mobile game developer recently acquired by Netflix, known for their successful IP mobile titles such as Stranger Things: Puzzle Tales and The Walking Dead: No Man's Land. Saara has had a close to a 15-year career in advertising, product marketing and public relations. At Next Games, where she has worked for nearly 10 years, she pivoted from CMO to COO last year and started a new journey officially in an operations role. In this episode, we will walk you through Next Games' cultural journey and transformation from its early startup days, to the company's financial restructuring, to going IPO, to becoming a Netflix studio.

Carol Miu is the CEO of PeopleFun known for the casual hit game Wordscapes. The company has seen tremendous growth from $100MM in annual revenue in 2018 to over $300MM currently. Carol shares her whole journey from joining the company in 2018 as the product leader on Wordscapes to becoming the CEO. Learn how Carol approached scaling an organization of 17 people to a mature organization of 100+ employees, and how to grow the team leaders in a sustainable way. After all, the leaders of an organization are the most influential people to steer the culture and company results.

For the occasion of International Women's Day, I want to celebrate with you all the virtue of Courage. The courage to be ourselves, the courage to change our lives when something is not right, the courage to listen to ourselves and to respect our needs, first. 

A month ago, I did something I was really afraid to do: tell a personal story on stage. 

The story you are about to hear is a performance I gave on stage at The Bear, a Berlin storytelling event with up to 100 people in the audience. You get up onstage, no notes, and tell a story that is related to a theme (on this evening, it was 'Work'). The more vulnerable you are, the more powerful the story ends up becoming. 

I really wanted to do it because I felt I had something to tell. I was afraid because I thought I was not capable of doing it. I thought I would panic on stage and fail. But what I usually do when I face a fearful situation, I dive into it. Because I know I will grow from this, I will learn, even if it is scary. 

I hope you will enjoy this special story, that will inspire you to do something daring and fun today, too. For yourself.

Happy International Women's Day! 

A proven way to build a strong company culture starts from the top, with the leadership. Is this the only way? 

Today, we discuss with Jussi Tähtinen, CEO and co-founder of Nitro Games, a Finnish mobile mid-core games studio, on how to build a culture bottom-up. How do you start the process when you want to involve your people in reevaluating your culture? How do you define company values bottom-up, and at which stage of the company should you do it? How often should you update you values and culture? Values are not just pretty words on the wall, so how do you turn them into everyday habits of the company life?

What is managing up? While there are plenty of books about how to be a good Leader, there are few to none about how to be a good follower. Why is that?

Wherever you are in this world, you will always report to someone, your boss, a stakeholder, or an investor. Making those relationships work is as important as the relationships you build in your team. How can you apply your empathetic superpowers to your manager? Managing up is good for you, good for your boss, and good for the organization as a whole.

In this episode, we cover how to "Manage Up" with Michail Katkoff (Managing Director at Savage Games Studios and Founder of Deconstructor of Fun) 

- How to be a good subordinate?

- How do you identify the "type" of your manager, and how do you adapt your leadership style for each?

- What are the upsides of managing up well?

According to studies in the US and Europe in 2021, 1 out of 5 of your employees are experiencing a diagnosable mental illness, 53% are saying that their work or work environment negatively impacts their mental health.

While it is an uncomfortable topic for company leaders, we cannot ignore the fact that it is happening on a global scale. What can we do about it and where is the line to draw between an employer and employees? 

In this episode, we tackle with Songya Why mental health issues happen and creep into the workplace. Impactful and durable changes happen from the top, so we will provide in this episode tools for leaders to first understand what mental health is about and how they can reflect on their own mental health. We will provide directions on how they can support the mental health of employees through the company environment they create.

Netflix has been in the spotlight since it announced its game platform. How do you approach building a portfolio of games for an entertainment platform? What are the skills required as a Publisher vs a Developer? How do you select the game developers who will be the best partners from the point of view of a publisher?

Leanne Loombe has extensive career developing and publishing games over the past 18 years, working on iconic franchises such as Magic the Gathering, Need for Speed, and League of Legends. She is currently heading up External Games at Netflix and helping to change how we play games through Netflix. In this episode, Leanne shares her learning on Publishing, coming from the lens of a game developer.

Additionally, Leanne is a passionate ambassador for Women In Game and focuses on encouraging women to join the industry and creating diversity in teams through mentorship, panels, and events.

DEI has been a buzzword over the past few years. It has been overused as an employer branding strategy or an attempt to correct inequality in the workplace. But implementing a DEI department, DEI initiatives or training won't resolve the root of the inequality gap. Durable changes start at the company's core (and top): Why do you exist? What is your mission and why caring about DEI will support your mission and values? Only then, you can identify where DEI must be implemented as part of your processes, to reflect the culture and mission you support. 

We will cover in this episode with Laura the concrete steps to incorporate DEI in your company: to be part of your hiring process, career development process, and feedback culture.

Laura is an organizational researcher and the former Head of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Bolt and the current founder of VALIDEI, a research agency specializing in assessments of DEI and scalability. Laura applies a data-informed approach to supporting viable businesses and ways of working.

Marie Mejerwall has an extensive career in gaming and design. She started in esports in 2001 and in game development in 2008 and has been involved in both ever since. During her career, she worked at studios such as Ubisoft, Warner  Bros, Eidos, and Capcom and climbed to become a game director.

Today, she is an advisor to game studios, publishers, and esports companies, and a popular host and event speaker. Marie shares her journey of building her own path in gaming, from engineering, to game design, to game direction, leading teams to building her own business. We talk about women (or the lack of them) in E-sport, what skills are expected of a Game Director, why game design is still such a young and evolving field and how to stay on top of it.

Thank you to our sponsors.

Perfect timing for this episode, ending the year with reflection thoughts and taking a step back on your life vision! In this episode, we discuss with Tom Hammond (serial entrepreneur in games) a few exercises to help you gain clarity on your life vision: Why do you work, what do you live for? What are your priorities in life (when you are not working)? How are you building a company that will outlive you? 

Here are a few tools we are sharing in this episode: value and life vision examination every 6 months, priorities and plans in the 5 core areas of your life (the 5F), envisioning your Ideal Day, life reflection from the deathbed, create accountability in your life change, timeline and moodograph...

More about Tom Hammond: Tom has been an active contributor to the Live Ops community with his podcast Mastering Retention and recently the UserWise Academy. Tom is sharing his entrepreneurial journey in creating his two companies TheoremReach and UserWise, his company culture and values, and what led him to create the Mastering Retention podcast. To "give back" to the community.

Thank you to our sponsors.

Isabelle Henriques has an impressive track record in games: 15 years of experience in management, operations, strategy, and production in the gaming industry. She is Brazilian and has a diverse background in gaming, previously acting as Studio Director and Lead Producer at Maxis and Electronic Arts, and has worked on multiple AAA blockbuster franchises including The Sims, Call of Duty, and Madden.

With solid experience in large AAA companies, Isabelle took a new journey as the co-CEO and COO of Klang Games, one of the best-funded gaming start-ups in Europe and is also acting as the Executive Producer for SEED, an MMO society simulator being developed at Klang.

In this episode, we cover the exciting challenges of joining a startup in a growing phase. How to integrate a leadership team that has history before you and build trust in a sustainable way? What is the pace of change when you come in to improve the culture, organization and process? I can relate a lot to Isabelle's challenges as I joined Savage Games and faced similar challenges. That's what we cover and debate about in this episode!

Thank you to our sponsors.

Forest Swartout-Large is the co-founder & COO at Twin Suns Corp, a new fully remote, global video game studio developing action games for console and PC, leveraging existing IPs. Previously, Forest worked on Tomb Raider, Inside, and Hitman, and most recently shipped Hitman III as the Executive Producer. With their new company, Forest aims to make AAA game development more ethical, inclusive, and sustainable. In this episode, learn from Forest how to build large AAA teams who embrace remote work from the start, with no crunch. What are the processes to make such a remote team of 50+ people collaborate well,  work in a healthy way, and trust each other? 

Thank you to our sponsors.

Should the leader of today be a coach? That's what we cover in this episode with Aaron and Ben, ex-leaders at Riot Games. They are now running a consultancy organization called Valarin to grow holistic leaders across companies and our industry because better leaders make better games.  Sharing the same mission as Rise and Play, that's how the three of us met in this episode. We are going back to the basics to remind the mission of a "Leader" vs a "Manager". How a Leader differs from a Manager, and why being a Leader requires different skills such as influencing, setting a vision, managing change, and active listening. What can you learn from being coached or being a coach? Why is it a competitive edge for you to grow your coaching skills now to become the leader of tomorrow?

Thank you to our sponsors.

Join us for a special and meta episode on... how to make podcasts! Have you ever considered starting your own podcast, and why should you consider a podcast to create content? That's what we are deconstructing with Lauren Kaye, the founder and host of the podcast She Plays Games. I was so happy to connect with another female podcaster in games, as we are very rare! Learn what you should consider before you create content (on youtube, on a podcast, or any media platform). Learn about our processes on how we design our content, source our guests, and edit our podcast episodes. Even if you're not planning to have your own podcast, this is still a young and untapped media platform you can experiment with! 

SHE PLAYS GAMES is a podcast dedicated to celebrating women who work in the games industry. We want to make the various roles in games visible to anyone looking to join the games industry whether through programming, QA, producing, streaming, content creation, and so on.

Thank you to our sponsors.

Marko Kecman was my ex Studio co-Lead at Voodoo. During our collaboration time at Voodoo, we spent long hours of thoughtful conversations to rethink how we could make our 1:1s meetings meaningful and impactful. It started with a simple question: What are the 1:1s for? Is it for us (as a manager), or for the people to grow? The format highly depends on what the goal is. We are sharing in this episode actionables on how to run your 1:1s when the primary goal is to develop your people: how to develop their self-awareness, emotional intelligence, and reflection skills? how to grow your future leaders? We will share the coaching tools we learned from being coached and trained (active listening skills, mirroring, the 3 levels of listening...).

Marko is an experienced Product & Project Manager with about 20 years of professional experience. His career started as a full-stack web developer where he quickly grew to become a Tech Lead, having to manage teams of developers.

Thank you to our sponsors.

Julia Palatovska is the co-founder and CEO of Dorian, a new creator platform that enables anyone to turn fiction into games and make money out of them! With Dorian, Julia's team is democratizing how digital stories are created (no-code platform), empowering storytellers from all around the world to tell the stories that deserve to be told. Julia shares her journey as an entrepreneur, from Ukraine to the Silicon Valley, leveraging her prior experience as a venture partner at LVP. Julia also gives advice on how to fundraise and pitch, who to hire for an early-stage startup, and why it is important to have more female-founded companies make an exit to bridge the gap in the number of VC funds led by women as well. 

Thank you to our sponsors.

Who hasn't played The Sims when they were young? The Sims has been part of our lives over the past 20 years and has evolved with our times as we evolved as a society. Join my conversation with Catharina Lavers-Mallet, VP/GM of The Sims & Maxis at EA. We talk about team culture, distributed teams at scale, and the evolution of The Sims franchise. 

Prior to EA, Catharina also acted as General Manager and Head of Studio at King. She built and scaled their London games studios and played a key operational and product leadership role in the growth of the company.

Thank you to our sponsors.

This is our first episode format with 2 guests, addressing the misunderstood and unspoken topics of motherhood and leadership. Betty and Emily share their personal journey as former Executives in big companies (Google, EA, Glu mobile), and what led them to build their own businesses once they became mothers. You will get insights into what is really happening when your employee goes through the experience of parenting, especially as a mother, and why many workplaces today are not adequate anymore for mothers who want to keep growing in their careers. 

How could we design a better work environment to support parents and mothers to keep thriving? The change starts with more awareness, education, and appropriate reintegration programs for parents. 

Thank you to our sponsors.

Vanessa Rouhani hasn't started her career in games or business. Still, she climbed the career ladders step-by-step thanks to her curiosity, and constant drive to learn and grow, which led her to become the SVP of Publishing and Product Marketing at Jam City. Vanessa shares how she is leading her marketing team at Jam City, focusing on people first while driving results. She also shares openly her vision of an inclusive workplace where mothers in executive roles can professionally thrive while keeping clear personal boundaries. Vanessa advocates how it is important to prioritize your personal life while having ambition for your career. Those are not mutually exclusive.  

Prior to joining Jam City, Vanessa served on the Mobile Publishing team at global video game publisher, Electronic Arts. She contributed to the successful launch of highly-rated original and licensed games, such as Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes, The Simpsons Tapped Out, FIFA.

Thank you to our sponsors.

Julie Beaugrand, former VP North Americas Studios at Gameloft and Head of Studio of Toronto, shares her journey building a new game studio at Rovio on a mission to crack the next casual hit game. From her 6 years running a successful large studio in Toronto, operating the hit game Disney Magic Kingdom, she took those learnings to build her new dream team. Take away from this episode how to start your new studio when you are embedded in a company, who to hire as new talents, who to bring with you from previous teams, how to build your network of mentors, and how to approach the current casual market. 

Thank you to our sponsors.

Take away from this episode how to think differently about money as an instrument to fulfill your life vision. Do you work for money or is money working for you?

Hear Jennifer Lufau's insights on how you can effectively repair racial inequality in your organization, and be part of the change too.

In this new season, I am kicking off a series of episodes in the format of coaching discussions, with experts on leadership and self-development themes. 

Today, I am sitting down with Tamara Rose, the Founder of Berlin Boss Babes, and a High-Potential and Leadership Coach for women.

Berlin Boss Babes' mission is focused on accelerating female advancement across career, business, and money. Prior to becoming a coach, Tamara was a top executive with 10+ years of experience in corporates and start-ups as a talent consultant.

In this episode, we tackle one of the most challenging life questions: What Do I Want In Life? 

Why is this question so hard to address?

A lot of our life scripts come from our childhood, education, and culture. If we never had the chance to examine those, we run on auto-pilot until we hit the wall. 

Tamara will share in this episode some practical tools on how to start to examine those questions for yourself:

- The 5 Whys

- Reconnecting with your inner child's dreams

- Prototype your new life

- Work with a Coach!

Thank you to our sponsors.

I am kicking off a new season for Rise and Play with our special guest Maria Sayans, the CEO at Ustwo Games.

Maria has been helping games companies succeed in the digital space, build great brands, launch games and engage players for nearly two decades. She spent 14 years at EA building online functions and on marketing leadership roles for franchises like Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Dead Space, Star Wars, Mirror’s Edge and Battlefield. In 2015 she joined CCP Games, the Icelandic developer of EVE Online, as their Chief Customer Officer. Since she joined Ustwo games, she has been helping the company evolve beyond their Monument Valley heritage and expand into new platforms and business models.

Among the notable success of Ustwo games: Monument Valley and Alba: A Wildlife Adventure.

In this episode, we are discussing what it takes to build a purpose-driven company culture and create games with meaning.

- What are the core values at Ustwo games, and how do they translate those values into team culture and game development?

- What is Ustwo's magic recipe for creating meaningful IPs such as Monument Valley and Alba?

- How Ustwo made a real impact in the world planting 1M+ trees with the success of Alba

Maria sets the example for a new generation of CEOs who are people and culture-focused. She enables the teams to create at their best, and she walks the talk!