The Party Is Full: Inside the Games Industry

Hilmar Veigar Pétursson is the CEO of Fenris Creations, formerly CCP Games, the Icelandic studio behind EVE Online. He joined CCP in 2000 as Chief Technology Officer, leading the engineering work behind the game’s persistent universe, and became CEO in 2004. Since EVE’s launch in 2003, he has helped sustain a world where players build economies, form alliances and fight wars that become part of it...

Paul Hellier is the founder and CEO of Engineered Alchemy, a boutique game engineering studio headquartered in Cyprus. The studio makes its own games and helps other developers and publishers ship theirs through porting, optimisation, feature development, Unity and Unreal work, and custom engine development. Before founding it in December 2025, Paul was Vice President of Technology at King, where...

Molly Sheets is a game designer, studio founder and engineering leader with more than 15 years of experience where games and cloud technology meet. After starting her career on film sets, she moved into games when the iPhone arrived, earned a games degree and released her first game in 2011. As lead designer at Thrust Interactive, she worked on a dozen games, including Words & Cards. Molly the...

Stephen Clarke-Willson is the Game Director of Guild Wars at ArenaNet. He joined the studio in 2004 as a contractor, adding music to the original game. He then moved into server programming, where he worked on Guild Wars Factions and its observer mode. Later he led the server team and became studio technical director across Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2. Today he leads the original game, which recen...

Julien Wera is Chief Operating Officer and Head of Publishing at Shiro Games, the independent studio behind Northgard and Wartales. His career began in online games and community management before moving into marketing, product strategy and studio leadership. Along the way, his work has included Tom Clancy’s The Division, Battlefield, Mirror’s Edge, Crusader Kings and Cities: Skylines. Career back...

Robin Boyar is the founder of thinktank research and strategy, a boutique consultancy in the San Francisco Bay Area that has spent close to two decades telling companies whether the thing they are building will actually work. Her practice runs on segmentation studies, concept surveys, focus groups, interviews, UX testing and games playability sessions, and her games clients include 2K, Activision...

Anthony Westerfield Kondeati is a brand strategist and gaming marketing leader focused on how ideas shape player behaviour. He is Vice President of Gaming Strategy at mindGAME Data, where he leads marketing strategy services built around mindSHARE, the company's share-of-attention metric connecting attention to sales, player numbers, and campaign outcomes. mindGAME's data can predict playe...

Motleyorc is a gaming creator whose YouTube channel combines rhythm game performances, Geometry Dash creations and experiments with World of Warcraft. His uploads include Cytus II and Cytoid runs, alongside Geometry Dash level showcases and videos explaining how he builds his projects. These include HEAVENSWARD and a breakdown of how he made a movement engine inside Geometry Dash, giving viewers b...

Amir Satvat is the founder and leader of ASGC, Always Supporting the Games Community, a volunteer led initiative he began in November 2022 to help people navigate careers and layoffs in games. What started as a LinkedIn spreadsheet now provides free job listings, career coaching, CV and portfolio reviews, mentorship, community support, and access to industry events. GamesBeat reported in June 2026...

Ramit Pahwa is a Senior Research Engineer at Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies, where he works on speech, language and multimodal AI. He led Rivian’s wake word detection programme from research through production, training the model on 20,000 hours of audio. His profile reports a 50 per cent reduction in false negatives and a 90 per cent reduction in false positives. His current work includ...

Richard A. Bartle is a British game designer, author, speaker, consultant, and Emeritus Professor at the University of Essex, where he previously served as Senior Lecturer and Honorary Professor of Computer Game Design. As an undergraduate in 1978, he created MUD with Roy Trubshaw. MUD allowed several people to inhabit the same continuing text world and is widely recognised as the first virtual wo...

Stefan Vaskevich is an AI 3D engineer, YouTuber and consultant with more than a decade of experience in 3D. Before focusing on AI, he spent seven years running 3D web studios and shipped hundreds of client projects. His work spans 3D production pipelines, interactive experiences and game development using tools including Blender, Unity and Unreal Engine. Through Stefan 3D AI, he tests emerging too...

Jonathan Yarbor is the cofounder and CEO of Nodecraft, a game server platform founded in 2012 to make it easier for players to create and manage their own multiplayer servers. Through Nodecraft Studio, the company also helps developers add player created servers and user generated content to their games. Jonathan’s work covers the infrastructure, moderation, and business models behind those commun...

Bob Holtzman is Director of Franchise Marketing at ArenaNet, where he leads content, community and brand marketing for the Guild Wars franchise. He manages work across social media, creators, influencers and player communications, with a focus on growing and retaining the Guild Wars community. Before ArenaNet, Bob led global brand, public relations and communications work for TiMi Studio Group and...

Catalin Alexandru is a systemic game economist and designer with more than 22 years of experience across game design, platform innovation and business models. Through his independent consultancy, he creates game economies from first principles using business strategy, behavioural psychology and systems design. He also writes the Intrinsic Economies newsletter and is the author of the True Ownershi...

Nate Pacyga is an agentic engineer, product builder and the technical founder of Game Monument, where he is building products focused on funding, engagement and community building in the games industry. He has spent more than 20 years combining software engineering with product and technical leadership across games, web applications, developer tools and prototypes. He also documents the products h...

Zac Beaudoin is the CEO and Executive Producer of T-Minus Zero Entertainment, an independent game production company. T-Minus Zero relaunched in 2026 after previously operating as a NetEase studio. In July 2026, the team launched DREGS on Steam in Early Access, a multiplayer cooperative horror comedy built around chaotic missions with friends. Zac also writes The Art of Making Great Games, where h...

David Klindt is an Assistant Professor in Neuroscience and Artificial Intelligence at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, working at the intersection of brains and machine learning. His research asks how the brain makes sense of a constantly changing world so effortlessly — and how those principles can build AI that's as flexible and robust as human perception. Before starting his lab in 2024, Davi...

Zach Letter is the Co-Founder and CEO of Wonder Works Studio, one of the leading developers on Roblox. Before founding the studio, Zach built an audience of more than one billion YouTube views as a gaming creator, an experience that shaped his belief that great games are built not just through development, but through community, storytelling, and distribution. Today, Wonder Works specializes in cr...

Recorded June 30, 2026, one week before Microsoft confirmed major layoffs across Xbox, including around 3,200 roles and several studio closures. We discuss these cuts as rumors in this episode because that is what they were at the time. They are confirmed now, and our thoughts are with everyone affected.----Tadhg Kelly is a game design and product management consultant with more than 26 years of e...

Omar Abdelwahed is an engineering leader, game developer, and technology executive with more than 25 years of experience building games, AI systems, and cloud platforms. Throughout his career, he has led engineering teams at Ubisoft, 2K, Playable Worlds, East Side Games, SoftBank Robotics, PLAYSTUDIOS, and most recently as CTO at Iconic Arts. Alongside his leadership roles, Omar remains a hands-on...

Emer Tanciatco is a senior game art leader and consultant with nearly two decades of experience guiding art production across some of PlayStation’s most recognised titles. Over more than 16 years at Sony Interactive Entertainment, he worked as a Lead Artist and later Art Supervisor, helping teams establish pipelines, visual standards, documentation, and co-development workflows across internal stu...

Shobek is a Classic World of Warcraft streamer best known for his immersive, anime-influenced roleplay and his deep love of WoW. He grew up gaming from the Sega Dreamcast era into Vanilla WoW, and after years of dreaming about it, he went all in on streaming in 2016, committing his entire twenties to the craft. The breakthrough took time, roughly seven years of living lean and refining his voice,...

Dead Space creator Glenn Schofield on building unforgettable horror, surviving AAA development, and why he's betting on AI.Glenn Schofield is one of the most influential creative leaders in modern video games, with a career spanning art, production, studio leadership, and game direction. He's best known as the creator and executive producer of Dead Space, one of the most celebrated horror...

Shahar Sorek and Francisco “Sandi” Montaño represent two complementary sides of the modern gaming creator economy: the platform-builder and the breakout creator. Sorek is the Chief Marketing Officer at Overwolf, the Tel Aviv-based “guild for in-game creators” that helps developers, modders, and UGC creators build, distribute, and monetize in-game apps, mods, and player-made experiences. In his rol...