Before Streamline Studios existed, three kids from different parts of the world met on the internet because they were trying to figure out how games worked.

One was in Germany.

One split his time between Holland and Trinidad.

One was in the United States.

We had never met. We had never worked together. We had no idea that decades later we would build a company, open studios around the world, work on hundreds of projects, and spend our lives in this industry.

We were modders. That was it.

In the late 1990s, the internet was a very different place. There were no online courses. There were no influencers teaching game development. There were no AI copilots answering questions in seconds.

Most of the time, there wasn’t even good documentation.

If something broke, you had to figure out why. If something worked, you had to figure out how.

We were trading builds, assets, ideas, and feedback across continents before most people had even heard the phrase “remote work.” Looking back, it feels primitive. At the time, it felt like magic.

What connected us wasn’t geography, education, or credentials. It was curiosity. We wanted to know how games worked, so we took them apart.

That may sound obvious today, but it is worth remembering because the games industry looked very different then. Nobody was talking about personal brands. Nobody was building content strategies. Nobody was optimizing LinkedIn profiles.

Nobody cared. There was no audience. There was only the work.

Back then, there was a kind of mythology around modding. You hoped someone would notice your work. Not because you were chasing fame. Getting noticed meant you had become good enough.

The dream wasn’t influence. The dream was competence.

Build something good enough and maybe a developer would see it. Maybe they would hire you. Maybe you would get a chance. Most of us never thought much further than that.

Twenty-five years later, I think that experience taught me something important. The people who build industries are usually the people who are curious enough to reverse engineer them first.

The modding communities of the 1990s were filled with artists, programmers, designers, and creators teaching themselves skills that nobody was teaching in schools. They weren’t following a roadmap.

They were creating one.

Over the years, I have interviewed studio heads, economists, doctors, filmmakers, and entrepreneurs on Video Games Real Talk. The pattern is always the same.

None of them started where they finished. The doctor became a game developer. The artist became an executive. The modder became a founder.

The common denominator was never credentials. It was curiosity. That pattern shows up more often than people realize.

Longevity is often the ultimate competitive advantage. Most people underestimate the power of staying in the arena long enough for experience to compound.

Curiosity is one of the reasons people stay. It keeps them learning. It keeps them adapting. It keeps them moving when others stop.

I’ve written about adaptation and the importance of evolving with the market rather than fighting it. Adaptation begins with curiosity. You cannot adapt if you have stopped asking questions. You cannot grow if you believe you already have the answers.

Today, AI can answer questions in seconds that used to take us weeks to solve. Yet the competitive advantage remains exactly the same. The people who win are still the people willing to ask the next question. AI allows us to reach results faster than before while iterating endless scenarios.

The same curiosity that built mods eventually built companies. It built careers. It built investment portfolios. It built technologies. It built industries.

Once you learn to pull things apart and understand how they work, you stop being a consumer and become a builder. That lesson became even clearer when we moved to Malaysia in 2010.

What we found there reminded me of those early modding communities.

We found raw talent, raw curiosity, and people willing to learn. People willing to experiment. People willing to put in the work before anyone was paying attention.

Over the years, I would see the same pattern in Colombia, Indonesia, and throughout the Global South.

Talent was everywhere. Opportunity was not.

The people who stood out were rarely the most credentialed. They were the ones already teaching themselves, already building, already doing the work before anyone asked them to.

Years later, Shawn Layden and I would discuss the same challenge on Video Games Real Talk. The future of gaming depends on new voices entering the industry. Not because diversity is a slogan, but because creativity requires new perspectives.

The next great studio, the next great technology, the next great idea is unlikely to come from the same places we have always looked.

One of the recurring themes that emerged across hundreds of conversations is that nobody waits for permission.

The people who stand out usually start before they are qualified. They build before they are hired. They learn before they are taught. They ask before they are invited.

Curiosity creates motion.

That observation eventually shaped how I think about hiring. A resume tells me where someone has been. Curiosity tells me where they are going. Credentials can open doors, but curiosity is what teaches people how to build them.

When I meet someone who wants to work in games, I am less interested in where they studied than I am in what they have tried to figure out on their own.

What did you build?

What did you break?

What did you experiment with?

What problem bothered you enough that you refused to leave it alone? Those questions reveal far more than any credential ever will.

Curiosity got us into the industry. Discipline kept us there. The last twenty-five years have taught me that both matter.

After all these years, I still ask the same question when I meet someone who wants to work in games.

Did you try to figure out how it works?

The answer tells me almost everything I need to know.

Photos by the Author. Koh Lipe 2019.

What an incredible time to be an entrepreneur.

AI is bursting at the seams with a velocity I haven’t seen since the first dot-com era. I was a teenager then, but the energy today feels familiar.

It’s hard not to get swept up in the optimism of what can be.

But optimism is the easy part.

The harder truth is this:

People will have to adjust.

And most people do not adjust well.

1995

In 1995, I got my first real job installing computers.

I walked into the office of an older man who looked up from his desk and said:

“Kid, I’ve got pencil and paper.”

A month later, he didn’t have a job.

The landscape was shifting. Desktop computers were moving into every office. Email addresses were replacing fax machines and copy rooms. Competence built in one era was becoming irrelevant in the next.

At the time, I couldn’t understand it.

Why resist something that could make you more effective?

Years later, I realized it wasn’t about intelligence.

It was about disposition.

You have to enjoy change.

Or at least respect it.

You have to believe you can ride the wave instead of being pulled under it.

And the hardest part?

That decision is entirely yours.

The Foundation

Most of my thinking returns to the same base:

Accountability. Intellectual honesty. Grit.

These are the building blocks.

This AI phase is no different.

Machines can now generate, analyze, design, simulate, and accelerate at a scale that would have been unthinkable even five years ago.

They compress time.

They compress cost.

They compress iteration.

What they do not eliminate is human fragility.

Adjustment is possible, even painful adjustment, if you’re willing to engage in a brutally honest internal debate that boils down to one question:

What choice do you really have?

The tools are not slowing down.

If anything, they are pushing more domains toward zero, marginal cost, friction, barriers to entry.

That doesn’t eliminate opportunity.

It reshapes it.

The window to learn is open.

It will not remain open forever.

Three Rules

• Know who you are

• Know what you want

• Know how to communicate

These rules apply to leadership, parenting, management, and now AI.

In essence, we have access to a savant apprentice. One that can absorb context, process information at speed, and produce work continuously.

Over time, if guided properly, it becomes indispensable.

But only if you treat it properly.

It’s not a chatbot.

It’s not a party trick.

It is leverage without judgment.

And leverage amplifies whatever you bring to it.

If you communicate lazily, you get mediocrity.

If you communicate clearly, you get acceleration.

Garbage in, garbage out.

The Experience Advantage

Anyone over 40 has a potential advantage.

Experience, if you were paying attention, is now an asset that can be embedded into these systems. Your judgment. Your taste. Your scars. Your pattern recognition.

Youth has speed.

Experience has direction.

When layered onto AI, direction becomes force.

But experience alone isn’t enough.

It has to be integrated.

When I watch people use AI for the first time, I’m often struck by their level of curiosity, or the absence of it.

And I think back to 1995.

Communication was already hard between people. Now it’s revealing when directed at a system that will respond to almost anything you feed it.

Some models flatter you. Some are indifferent. The result depends on how you engage.

If you know who you are and communicate with clarity, you create a recursive environment where quality compounds.

Think about your best interns or young hires. If you invested in them, you saw the transformation.

The environment determines the growth.

AI behaves similarly.

Only faster.

Quantum Leap

Twenty-five years ago, a few young men started a video game company. They survived recessions, platform shifts, market bubbles, and product failures.

Today, they sit on decades of experience and data.

Layer AI on top of that foundation, and the curve bends.

Everyone has a version of this story. A body of experience. A hidden archive of lessons.

The mission now is unlocking it.

At a recent conference, I caught myself saying:

“If only we had these tools when we were 20.”

Then I corrected myself.

Even if we had the tools, we wouldn’t have had the judgment to use them properly. We would have failed faster.

Which, to be fair, is still progress.

But it would have required curiosity.

It would have required a learning mindset.

And those are traits no one can give you.

The technology isn’t the separator.

Disposition is.

The wave is here.

The question is simple:

Will you ride it, or insist on pencil and paper?

All images generated by GPT & prompted by the Author.

I’ve been running a company for 25 years with a growing understanding that details make all the difference. That wasn’t obvious on day one. It emerged slowly, year after year.

At the end of each year, I would return to my notes and journals and synthesize what I had learned, what I could do better, and what I wanted from the year ahead. There was nothing groundbreaking about the practice itself, but over time something clearer began to surface: cycles, of the industry, the company, and me.

That’s when it clicked. Cycles repeat. History rhymes. Humans make the same mistakes.

If I could consolidate those patterns and compress them, I could extract more than what was visible in the moment. That realization became the foundation of the operating system I’ve used for nearly two decades.

What I want to do and what I have to do are rarely the same. Anyone who has raised kids or run teams understands this tension. Aligning people to what must be done, rather than what they want to pursue, is painful and requires patience, often more than it should. But it’s also a test of character.

When it comes to ourselves, it’s a different game entirely. It’s easy to neglect the one thing fully under your control: you.

The framework I built rests on a simple premise: life reflects back what you put out.

Empty and shallow input produces dull, useless outcomes. Focused and genuine effort compounds into opportunity.

Knowing what yields what comes down to knowing who you are and what you’re actually trying to accomplish. A plan at 20 looks nothing like a plan at 45, and it shouldn’t.

The work starts by emptying the emotions and confusions circulating in the mind. You order the chaos by working backward from the end until the true starting point becomes clear.

This is where journaling earns its place. It forces confrontation. A direct conversation with yourself, not the stories you tell others, but the truths you may never have expressed. It’s uncomfortable at first. Over time, it becomes therapeutic.

But therapy wasn’t the point. What mattered was what I could finally see once the noise was gone.

Standards Matter

What I didn’t realize early on was that journaling gave me my first real superpower: observation.

That skill carried directly into the planning system I still use. The central premise is simple: the system starts with me. Not ego, but responsibility, what I must achieve to unlock the next outcomes I care about.

Standardizing the questions I ask myself each day removes friction. It forces rhythm, the invisible beat that keeps everything moving.

Daily questions:

• Primary focus of the day

• Three things I must accomplish

• Three things I delegated

• Reflection

• Concerns and opportunities

That’s it.

Five to ten minutes a day, depending on complexity. I usually do it around 6:15 a.m. with a cup of coffee.

It looks deceptively simple. But repeated daily, something powerful happens: compression of time and clarity of execution. You know what needs to be done, and why.

I don’t stop there. I journal daily alongside this prompt.

The combination creates a depth of data I can draw on weeks or even years later. That recall becomes a superpower of its own, one I’ll explore in a future essay.

This initial layer carried me through the first three years of meaningful personal and company evolution. For those who remember it, the old Franklin Covey system and The 7 Habits were early influences. My third-grade class was taught that planner in the early ’90s, and more of it stuck than I realized at the time.

What emerges from this practice is a person clear of mind and uncompromising about what needs to be done. Not because of motivation or inspiration, but because the work has been named, owned, and faced daily.

Master this process over 30 to 60 days and you set the foundation for everything that follows. This is the first layer. The rest of the system builds on it.

Until then, write honestly. Move deliberately. And pay attention to the silence that clarity creates over time.

This is how alignment begins: one honest page at a time.

Photos by the author. Yao Noi 2025.

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Spend enough time doing something and you improve. Dedicate yourself to it and you get back more than you thought possible. I’m on the eve of celebrating the 25th anniversary of the company my partners and I founded when we were 20 years old. Despite the passing years and an aging appearance, it feels like we just started yesterday. I used to chalk that up to freedom and choice, but I now know it runs deeper.

Repetition and practice turned an improbable experiment into one of the greatest life lesson I’ve had. Life rewards, takes, and shapes you if you’re willing to submit to the unknown that contains it all.

Spoiler alert, I would do it again and regret nothing. I wanted a life less ordinary, and that’s exactly what I received.

Risk is nothing more than uncertainty. You adapt.

Starting a video games company in Amsterdam already sounds far-fetched. In 2001, it was downright absurd.

There were no indie dreams. No digital distribution. Entrepreneurship wasn’t mainstream. Locals, descendants of people who once sailed the seas, invented the stock market, and made fortunes on tulips, would quote things like, “Normal is crazy enough,” or, “If you stick your head out of the grass, it gets cut off,” whenever I explained what we were building.

I don’t blame them. Video games, right after the dot-bomb crash of 2000?

Every pitch was the same. We’re going to make games in Amsterdam for the global market. By day we sell services. By night we build original IP. We were young, talented, and willing to brutalize ourselves to make it work. I usually lost them the moment I said “video games.”

Alongside the ridicule were well-wishers. People who had tried and failed. People who believed in something bigger. That belief and assistance were enough to stand the company up and go for it.

In those early days, I learned how contagious belief can be. People from vastly different backgrounds took a 20-year-old seriously. Because I believed we would make it, they helped. Doors opened that still matter today.

People want to help, sometimes just to glimpse what could have been.

Mindset Matters

Youth has power not because of energy, but because ignorance doesn’t know impossible. At 20, the mind is full of theories and unproven ideas. There is no proof, only emotion, and emotion transfers. We hadn’t yet been polluted by social media or external expectation. We believed craft and mastery justified everything. We didn’t think about optics. We focused on outcomes aligned with the mission. Negativity wasn’t useful, so it wasn’t allowed.

When we lost deals or couldn’t eat, it hurt, but it never derailed the mission. We knew it would be fine. Why wouldn’t it be? As long as we could afford 30-cent beer, rice, noodles, and cheese from Lidl, the German discount supermarket, we believed we would conquer the world. In the depths of malnutrition, I learned a simple truth. Want and need are never the same. My needs were few. My wants unlimited, but subordinate to time. Once I learned to respect time, everything became possible.

Time Is Currency

My first paycheck came nearly two and a half years after we started. I had bills, student debt, and a desire to enjoy life, but all of it took a backseat to the dream.

I learned the power of deferral. Combined with honest conversation, most things can be negotiated. Most people never ask. They accept what’s written. Those who ask sometimes get it. I pushed student loans to their limits and enlisted time as an ally. As my cousin once told me, if you don’t open your mouth, you won’t eat.

Commitment Beats Opinion

Over the years I worked with every type of personality imaginable. The hardest were those armed with unproven opinions. I learned to smile at them. Reality always tells the truth. Commitment and follow-through win every time. Opinions cost nothing. The summer anarchist, winter conformist stands for nothing beyond themselves. Loud, righteous, and absent of real output.

Performative vs. True

Consistency is hard in any industry, especially games. Heroics and rhetoric are always nearby until suddenly they aren’t. After 25 years, I’ve seen hypocrisy, insecurity, and spectacle in abundance. Seeing past that noise to the real human experience is what keeps it grounded.

The industry is dramatic and still searching for its place in the world. Decisions often look ruthless or inexplicable. Commentators rush to explain them, only to discover no one truly knows why.

Volatility is vitality. It’s not a flaw in the games industry, it’s the feature. It creates asymmetry and makes the game worth playing. If you understand that, you recover faster when things don’t go your way, even if you have to grind longer. This industry has always been this way. Read the patterns. Pay attention over time. Enjoy the suck, because as brutal as it gets, there are moments that are extraordinary.

After 25 years, I know volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity aren’t lives most people want. For me, they are the nature of entrepreneurship and the world we’re entering. I was lucky to learn this in an industry I love. Even when it gets insane, and it often does, I can smile and remember it all started with a simple question.

What if we tried?

What if it worked?

The crazy part is, it did.

Photography by everyone who came through our doors.

I’ve watched co-development fail in every way it possibly can.

• Quietly.

• Expensively.

• Politely.

Sometimes the partner gets blamed. Sometimes the geography. Sometimes “communication.”

After 24 years and more than 400 shipped titles, I’ve learned something uncomfortable:

When co-development fails, it’s almost never for the reasons leadership says out loud.

I first wrote a version of this article in 2015, when “outsourcing” was still treated as a transactional necessity, something you bolted onto a production when things were already on fire.

A decade later, co-development is no longer optional. It’s how modern games are built.

What hasn’t changed is why it fails.

What has changed is that we now understand the difference between outsourcing and orchestration. Between renting hands and building outcomes. Between vendor management and shared accountability.

Co-development doesn’t fail because of geography.

It fails because of misalignment, weak systems, and leadership avoidance.

Here are five reasons it still breaks, and what we’ve learned the hard way.

5. Spec Creep Is Leadership Failure, Not a Production One

You can’t hit a moving target.

And yet most co-development engagements begin with documents that look complete until real production starts.

Specs drift because:

• Decisions aren’t owned

• Trade-offs aren’t surfaced early

• Reality is postponed in favor of optimism

For years, I believed this was a production discipline problem. Better documentation. Tighter control. More reviews.

I was wrong.

Specs don’t drift because teams are careless. They drift because leadership avoids making hard calls visible.

At Streamline, we learned that specs can’t be treated as static documents. They are living commitments, tied to owners, milestones, risk, and cost.

When something changes, it must be explicit:

• What moved

• Why

• Who approved it

• What it costs

No ambiguity. No silent scope bleed.

Principle:

Clarity is cheaper than heroics. Every time.

4. “Cheap” Is the Most Expensive Strategy in Games

Co-development collapses fastest when procurement logic overrides production reality.

If a quote feels too good to be true, it usually is.

And when you squeeze a partner below sustainability, you don’t get savings, you get:

• Rework

• Attrition

• Delay

I’ve seen this pattern repeat across studios of every size. The spreadsheet says you saved money. The schedule and team morale say otherwise.

What matters isn’t day rates. It’s the total cost of outcome:

• Iteration cycles

• Integration friction

• QA loops

• Producer load

• Opportunity cost of delays

Cost control without delivery control isn’t discipline. It’s gambling with better spreadsheets.

Principle:

If you don’t price for reality, reality invoices you later.

3. Treating Partners as “Hands” Wastes Their Greatest Value

Most co-development partners have seen more broken pipelines, late pivots, and last-minute saves than internal teams ever will.

Yet studios routinely ignore that experience.

I’ve been in rooms where the people closest to the work saw the problem early and didn’t feel they had permission to say it. Weeks later, leadership discovered the same issue at ten times the cost.

That’s not a partner problem. That’s a trust problem. When something starts to go sideways, the most valuable question leadership can ask is simple:

“What are you seeing that we’re missing?”

That question alone has saved productions.

Principle:

If you don’t trust your co-development partner’s judgment, you chose the wrong partner.

2. Infrastructure Is the Multiplier

Co-development doesn’t scale on goodwill.

It scales on systems.

Email chains, slide decks, and status meetings do not survive:

• Time zones

• Iteration velocity

• Modern content volume

Culture matters, but infrastructure decides whether culture survives contact with reality.

We rebuilt our operating layer around a single source of truth, one that shows work as it exists, not as it’s reported:

• In-engine visibility

• QA-first routing

• Live reporting without theater

• Signal for leadership, not noise

That’s how distributed teams operate without drowning in coordination debt.

Principle:

If your system can’t show reality in real time, reality will show up late and expensive.

1. The Wrong People in Charge Will Sink Everything

This is the quiet killer.

Co-development fails when it’s managed by:

• Inexperienced producers learning under fire

• MBAs with no shipping scars

• Leaders without mandate or authority

For too long, the industry treated co-development as a side function, something junior, something to delegate, something to buffer away from “real” leadership.

That belief is costly.

Co-development leadership isn’t a title. It’s earned through pressure. Through decisions made close to the work. Through escalation paths that are fast and real.

Middle layers that exist to buffer discomfort don’t protect teams, they delay truth.

Principle:

Co-development is not a support function. It’s a core business capability.

The Reality We’re In Now

Co-development isn’t about outsourcing anymore.

It’s about orchestration.

• Global execution with earned trust

• Experience over headcount

• Systems over promises

• Delivery over theater

I’ve seen what happens when leadership engages honestly and when it hides behind distance until the bill arrives.

Only one of those paths ships and everyone knows which one they’re on.

Photos by the author. Taken in Bangsar, 2019.

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Every founder sees from a certain altitude. Some only see what’s in front of them, cost pressure, hiring, the next contract, the next milestone.

Some see culture, values, friction, misalignment, the emotional math of leading people.

And then there’s the third altitude, the one above the noise, where events turn into patterns, markets turn into cycles, and reaction becomes design.

Most never reach it. Even fewer stay there.

Here’s what I see.

I See the Pattern

The games industry destroys itself every five to seven years. If you’ve been around long enough, you know the feeling, a contraction, layoffs, spending freezes, entire studios wiped out.

I’ve survived three of them.

After a few cycles, you stop pretending anything is stable. You stop betting on good times. You stop believing your own hype. You stop assuming you’re safe. You prepare before others notice the shift.

In 2022, I felt the temperature change. The pattern was forming again.

So we moved before the world did.

I See the Access Problem

Talent is global. Access is not. Most people don’t fail from lack of ability, they fail because they can’t get into the room, wrong city, wrong network, wrong price tag, wrong timing.

Most companies look at the Global South and see lower cost. I saw something else:

The next 3 billion builders, creators, and consumers.

If the world is globalizing but access isn’t, then the future belongs to the ones who build the bridge.

So we built one.

I See Culture as Software

Most companies treat culture like branding, posters, offsites, consultants.

It doesn’t work.

If culture can’t survive pressure, it isn’t culture. If it disappears when someone leaves the room, it isn’t culture. If it needs to be sold, it isn’t culture.

Culture is software. Talent is hardware. Software determines how the system runs.

Directness. Honesty. Communication. Responsibility.

Everyone knows how to make a game. Not everyone knows how to talk. That’s the real operating system.

I See Communication as the Root Cause

Every production failure looks different on the surface. Underneath, the cause is always the same:

• Someone didn’t speak when they needed to.

• Silence kills more projects than bad code.

• Avoidance kills more teams than incompetence.

• Ambiguity kills more momentum than failure.

People don’t break because they lack skill. They break because they don’t know how to say what’s true. Tools don’t fix this. Meetings don’t fix this. Policies don’t fix this.

Clarity does.

I See the Full Stack

A CEO operates across three altitudes, operational - the work, cultural - the people, systemic - the world they’re inside.

Most founders see one. Some see two. I’ve been forced to live all three, the benefit of time, failure, and crisis.

You can’t build a global company from one altitude. You can’t scale culture from a spreadsheet. You can’t orchestrate a system if you only understand your own pain.

And you can’t survive cycles if you’ve never lived through one.

I See the Long Road

People assume Streamline’s global model was deliberate.

It wasn’t, it was survival. Amsterdam stopped making sense. Malaysia did. Then Colombia. Then the Global South as a whole.

Streamframe wasn’t a product idea. It was the tool we needed to not fall apart. It became an advantage only after it became a necessity.

Nothing about the journey was clean or linear. It wasn’t designed for presentation. It was built the way resilient things are built:

Out of pressure, not preference.

Do You See What I See?

When I look at this industry, I don’t see publishers and developers, East and West, AAA and indies, winners and losers.

I see the pattern, the architecture, the leverage points, the cycles, the people still standing in 10 years, and the ones who won’t be.

I see the studio that thinks it’s fine right before the contraction hits. I see governments trying to understand who actually creates jobs. I see the opportunity no one is structuring around yet.

Most people see their lane, this project, this year, this round, this crisis, this win.

I see the board. That’s the difference.

Do you see what I see?

Photos by the author. Manila. Grand Teton. Bali.

I recently spent time with a group of industry CEOs who have actually done the work. Builders. Operators. Survivors. Each came with a story forged through pain, luck, grit, and unreasonable effort. And as we talked, I realized why I found it so enjoyable: every single one of them possessed brutal awareness.

• Awareness of who they are.

• Awareness of how life works.

• Awareness of the costs they’ve paid.

• Awareness of what success truly extracts.

Because of that, the conversations were honest, sharp, and often hilarious. There’s something liberating about sitting with people who understand the absurdity of leadership, how running a company can be both devastating and ridiculous in the same breath. And in those moments, a simple truth stood out:

You have to learn how to laugh at the darkness.

Not out of cynicism, and not because you lack empathy. But because leadership demands the ability to hold contradictory emotions at once, to remain human in situations that feel, at times, hopeless or unfair. That release valve has saved me more times than I can count.

The way you build that capability is deceptively simple:

Accept reality. All of it.

As long as it’s not life or death, the sun will rise. You will face the consequences. And no amount of blame or deflection changes that. When you internalize this, nothing feels fatal. Nothing feels permanent. And the absurdity becomes manageable.

The metaphor I use is packaging.

A problem is only overwhelming when you refuse to pick it up. But once you name it, size it, and box it, you can move it. You can give it a place.

Brutal awareness is the upgrade to this.

It says everything can be packaged, even your emotions.

It ends self-deception because it frees you to see things as they are, not as you wish they were. That clarity creates a recursive feedback loop: the world sharpens, your responses strengthen, and what was once crippling becomes routine. What used to break you becomes fuel.

This is the trait I’ve seen in the leaders who endure. Not just the successful ones, the ones who outlast.

I’m thankful I learned this early. Thankful for the founders and operators who never hid the truth. Thankful for two and a half decades of leading people from every background imaginable. Those years gave me a life that is often chaotic, occasionally absurd, but never dull.

And when I look back at those conversations with other CEOs, it always circles to the same place:

a desire to see more, become more, and find out what “possible” actually looks like.

Photos by the author. Skies of Europe 2019.

Do something enough times and you naturally start to see what can be improved. Create systems around it, and you get predictable results that can adapt and scale. This is true in work, and it is also true for individuals. The key is having the strength to pull things apart and rebuild them while still executing.

Once mastered, you begin to see life as it truly is: a series of repeating loops and patterns that can be optimized.

Why you would want to do this comes down to a simple idea: reducing cognitive load lets you live longer in your genius. That is the skill set you excel at, not the drudgery that blocks you from using it.

Now, I want to be clear: not everything has to be or should be optimized, but a lot can. Once you pull off the plastic, life never looks the same.

Cognitive Loads

There is only so much the mind can take at once, and if you have ever noticed how tired you get after a long day of challenging work, you have felt the exhaustion of high cognitive loads. Surprisingly, those days are generally the most exhausting when the majority of your time is filled with tasks of general administration, reporting, or meetings.

You can see this for yourself by logging a week of work, noting the various tasks you perform, and making sure to list how you feel at the end of each day and how you wake up feeling the next. The reflection can be surprising.

Once you have recognized the pattern, you can start optimizing. You do this by first understanding the motivating factors behind your circumstances: knowing what you are trying to achieve and noting how your actions connect to your personal goals, actions, and decisions. If at any point reading this you are realizing that you have never thought about this, do not worry; most people do not, which is why chaos engulfs them.

A simple exercise is to work backwards from a quarter: list what needs to be done, then map your weekly actions against it to see how they contribute to the desired results. If you find most of your days go to actions unrelated to those quarterly outcomes, then we have a problem, and a logical place to begin optimizing.

Optimization 1: OK Computer

Ask yourself:

• Of all the repeated tasks you noted in your week, which takes the most effort and time?

• Why?

• Who does it benefit?

• Who relies on it?

Here you can rely on the 5 Whys to boil down the activity until you get to the essence of the problem being solved by the task. You may discover that it is actually nonsensical or based on circumstances that no longer apply. In your exploration, you may find the assumptions no longer make sense and the task has become a habit born from status quo, not efficiency.

This happens to a lot of teams and departments that use routine as management instead of introspection and reflection at set times. It is just as true for an individual.

Having found the biggest item, reviewed it, and reflected on it, we turn our attention to how we can automate it, build a workflow around it, or remove it with AI. Most repetitive tasks are enshrined in pattern recognition and steps, perfect places for AI and computer automation to step in. If you are screaming you are not technical at this point, I am going to help you with something: time to learn. We have come to a point where no one can reasonably expect or excuse themselves from learning technology at their job or in their life.

If that upsets you, good. Use that anger to learn something empowering that will change your life and make you competitive in the world that has arrived. We will save that discussion for another day, but no, my dear anon, the world is racing toward an augmented human existence. Self-driving cars, AI, and smart contacts are just a hint of what is to come.

Optimization 2: Order of Operations

Once you have optimized your first item and experienced an increase in time and thought, you will immediately want to start optimizing everything. This is good, but do not do that just yet. It is time to focus on the order of operations.

Remember that simple math concept we learned in grade school? Yes, that one.

Life has an order of operations that extends into every aspect of it. It is systemic, and once seen, you can begin to understand the order of operations behind just about everything. It is architecture. It flows. It is results.

Take this thinking and boil your other tasks down into their order of operations, noting what comes first:

• Why?

• When?

• How?

• What?

• Where?

Afterward, you will have a blueprint of what matters most, and you will now see the system inhabiting your life. Depending on what you find, that can be awe-inspiring or debilitating. Stay positive here, everything can be adjusted.

Living Your Genius

Once implemented, you will start finding more time. More joy. More opportunity. It is amazing, because you have actually created time.

This is where living in your genius creates alpha. Remember, knowledge compounds. So does time and experience, which is why you will want to establish a routine of review on a monthly or quarterly basis, where you rerun this process to find new and better ways to do things. I run mine every six weeks and adjust quarterly.

For teams, I have found this to be best done quarterly and tied to goals and measures that consider results. If you implement this process at the individual level, then at the group level, you will see an amazing gain. Now, this assumes three character traits that some may not find easy to maintain:

1. Discipline – repeating the routine

2. Grit – facing reality head-on (good/bad)

3. Accountability – taking ownership (good/bad)

If you struggle with these three, this process will be challenging, but it is still worth doing as it will force you to develop, even if it hurts.

I have seen firsthand how much this approach changes lives. It becomes a bellwether of performance and leadership development. With a systemic approach, chaos is reduced significantly, allowing individuals to blossom and teams to over index.

The only thing required is the maturity to face yourself, which, ironically, is always the main challenge in life.

Photos by the author. Shot in Portugal 2019.

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Every company talks about the tech stack. Tools, pipelines, integrations, automation.

We obsess over it because it’s easy to see. You can buy it, chart it, benchmark it.

The human stack is harder. You can’t measure it. You can’t fake it.

It’s the communication, trust, and discipline that hold everything else together. And it’s the first thing to fall apart when pressure hits.

During a recent panel prep, I said:

“There’s a human stack and a tech stack. The human stack is the soft skills, communication, trust, leadership, discipline. The tech stack is the process, tools, and workflow that support them. Technology exists to amplify people’s genius, not to replace it.”

That landed because everyone in the room had felt it.

Projects don’t fail because the tool breaks. They fail because the people stop talking.

The Stack We Forget

We’ve built industries around perfecting the tech stack, new engines, new dashboards, new ways to track what’s already known.

And yet the same issues keep repeating: silence, ego, avoidance, fatigue.

That’s not a software problem. That’s a human stack failure. When the human stack collapses, the tech stack becomes a crutch.

You can automate reports, flood inboxes, spin up dashboards, but you can’t automate integrity or courage.

You can only model them. Protect them. Keep them alive under stress.

How the Two Work Together

Technology has one purpose: remove friction so people can operate in their zone of genius.

That’s it. Everything else is noise.

When both stacks align, people clear, systems clean, you get rhythm. When they drift apart, no software patch can fix it.

The job of leadership is to keep the stacks synchronized: clear processes that protect focus, and a culture strong enough to survive clarity.

A Simple Test

When something breaks, what’s your first instinct? Do you blame the tool or the behavior? If you blame the tool, you’re treating symptoms.

If you fix the behavior, you’re rebuilding the foundation.

Technology multiplies whatever already exists. If the human stack is disciplined, the tech stack scales it.

If the human stack is weak, the tech stack exposes it.

Before you update your tools, check your people. Before you rebuild your systems, check your habits.

The future will always be built on the same truth:

People deliver promises, not software.

Photography by the author. All shot in Tokyo in 2024.

My favorite time of year starts on November 1st. We’re in the final stretch, the moment when everything either comes together or comes apart. It’s where you and your team can go down in a blaze of glory or just a blaze. The difference between those who rise and those who don’t is simple: discipline.

For twenty-four years I’ve seen all kinds of teams. What separates the ones that make it from the ones that fade isn’t talent or money, it’s their discipline toward the small things. A meeting. A note. A dinner. Did they do what they said they would? Did they communicate it to their colleagues? That last one always tells the truth.

October through December is pure magic. Used well, it can slingshot your team over the chasm of winter and land you softly in spring. The discipline to meet, report, and confront — embedded properly in your rhythm — means you’ll do just that. Otherwise, you stumble forward, hoping luck spares you from the wall.

Sounds like work

If that flashed through your mind, you’re right, my dear anon. It is work. This is where leadership and management prove whether they can hold the line. Because discipline isn’t a feature you can toggle or something AI can generate. It’s human. It’s trained. It’s earned.

Before you start waving the banner of your “core values,” remember this: discipline is just the act of reducing friction through repeatable habits that demand nothing greater than your own effort. If we can’t do that, then we don’t deserve much beyond what happens to us. Harsh? Maybe. Realistic? Absolutely.

The good news is you can start building it today by doing one simple thing, make your bed in the morning. That small act primes the mind for action. It creates momentum in real time, the same kind you’ll need to close the year strong. If you already live with discipline, thank the moments that taught you.

Real talk

Every September, I start pulling the strings of the coming year. Observations, metrics, and sense all mix into a soup of thought that turns into a document, one that forces confrontation between expectation and reality. That act becomes a mirror. It clears away the residue of the past nine months and resets focus.

Leadership gets candid. We face what’s working and what isn’t. For those who can’t handle negativity, this meeting shows exactly why they shouldn’t be in the room. The truth has edges, but those edges shape the year ahead.

Afterward, we realign, push it through the team, and lock in. Will we make it? Who knows. But for that October push, we move with such force that even the walls start to bend. That surge of effort, that moment when exhaustion turns to clarity, is the energy we chase.

Quaint but true

Nobody likes losing because they didn’t tie their shoelaces before the race. No one wants to lose because Bill didn’t rename his files, or because Stan wouldn’t talk to the client. Yet it happens, especially now, because people stop caring just a little too early.

Start making your bed. Have real talk with your team. Show up clear, committed, and alive for the final weeks of the year.

Because this isn’t the end.

It’s the test before the bridge.

Photography by the author. All shot in Vietnam in 2023.

Broken Better

There’s a Japanese art called kintsugi—repairing broken ceramics with gold so the cracks become the beauty. Entrepreneurship is its modern echo. It’s one of the few places where the tragic, bizarre, euphoric, and creative collide. It breaks you, and if you let it, rebuilds you stronger.

Creative hype and financial adrenaline aside, the work is bruising. Thin skin and lazy thinking only create headaches. Too many treat entrepreneurship as a get-rich-quick scheme; they’d be better off at a casino. If you’re going to play, expect hits. Each one, if you learn, makes the next round easier.

Nowhere is this truer than building a video game studio. The human and industrial dramas rhyme everywhere. What changes are your resources, your market, and how fast you bounce back.

Learning to Fight

If you’ve ever been in a fight, you know the surge before the first punch and the shock when it lands on you. Fight or flight, that’s the first test. Many say they’ll fight.

Most don’t. Most run.

It usually comes down to three things:

1. Arrogance — overestimating yourself and underestimating reality.

2. Incompetence — theory collapses when capability is required.

3. Fragility — the world shatters when you realize no one is coming to save you.

When ego breaks, one truth remains: only effort changes outcomes.

Running is the consolation prize. For those who stay, round one delivers its first lesson:

Almost everything can be solved through honest communication.

It may not go your way, but most people don’t want to harm you. Truth, effort, and respect go further than bravado. Learning this takes humility, the kind that comes from knowing who you are, not who you wish you were.

That nuance is everything.

Compounding Knowledge

If you keep going, the unknown becomes known. Scar tissue becomes signal. You see more clearly, read context faster, feel people before they speak.

That’s the entrepreneur sense, level one.

Practice doesn’t make perfect; it compounds. The more you do, the more you gain if you reflect and apply.

At this stage many sell, shut down, or push further. The last group is rare. They taste what happens when you slingshot from devastation into abundance: the quiet satisfaction of knowing you can.

By now, the entrepreneur no longer resembles the beginner. Others may not notice. You will. Something changed. You wonder why you could when others couldn’t. The mix is real—guilt, sadness, gratitude, relief. It doesn’t make anyone better or worse, only proven.

Loud Mouths, No Capability

As you level up, the choir of uninformed opinions grows. Some people can’t face their own fragility, so they fill the feed with critique. If you’ve walked through hell, you’ll hear them loudly.

Treat it as noise. Listen for the few with merit and discard the rest. The choir won’t shrink; it will expand with each round. Let it remind you how far you’ve climbed.

Just remember:

The cracks never disappear; they just stop owning you.

What was once a wound becomes pattern, and pattern becomes proof.

Those who survive long enough stop asking why me and start asking what now.

That’s when the work turns to gold.

Photography by the author. Shot in Malaysia, 2024. Special thanks to AB Bros.

Turning Corners

Since late 2022, the bottom’s fallen out of the video game industry, and everyone felt it hit.

What started as glacier-slow movement turned into a rapid tsunami, mass layoffs, record studio closures, and broken pipelines everywhere.

For many, it was the first time they’d seen change move that fast, and it’s fair how some reacted.

For those of us who’ve been in this game long enough to get scarred by it, it was a reminder that volatility’s a feature, not a bug, and that no matter how smart you think you are, the macro always wins.

After the Crash

What matters now is what comes next for an industry with no institutional memory and a chronic shortage of leadership training.

It’s not a criticism; it’s reality.

Most people don’t stay long enough to earn the scars that teach endurance. The boom-and-bust cycles turn the business into a casino; the lessons of risk and reward vanish the minute the money starts flowing again.

That’s a feature, not a bug. Collective trauma fades the moment the money counters start humming again.

And yes, they’re already on. Can you hear them, anon?

We’ve inherited an industry in the Global North split into three camps:

1. Aging founders with no successors and medium costs.

2. Aging founders with successors and high costs.

3. Aging institutions with state-sponsored support and relative costs.

All face the same demographic cliff, shrinking birth rates and industrialized education systems that pitch games as a “safe” career, safe being relative.

They have legacy IP, established markets, and the will to keep playing.

What they lack is a sustainable way to make money without betting the company each time.

We once called that space AA or single-A, then indie.

Today, for large companies, it’s practically nonexistent; the juice just isn’t worth the squeeze.

That’s how we end up with $100 million development budgets, billion-dollar franchises, and the kind of corporate math where shutting down a game can yield a better return than shipping it.

It may sound cold, but for those who have actually run studios or carried payroll, we know the truth. Every headline that’s appeared over the past three years can be summed up in two words: business viability.

Viability sits at the intersection of hard choices, humanity, and timing. When those three align, it feels like magic. When they don’t, you get exactly what we’ve all witnessed.

A Global Shift

From 2000 to 2022, we witnessed a global boom that brought developers in the Global North face-to-face with those in the Global South.

Experience, knowledge, and economics flowed between regions, enabling the large-scale AAA games we all play today.

The odds that your favorite franchise involved an offshore team skyrocketed with each console generation release as development teams emerged across Eastern Europe, China, Latin America and Southeast Asia.

Governments, Malaysia notable among them, invested millions in developing local talent, producing developers who have been working on major franchises for more than a decade.

I’ve lived this first-hand.

After relocating Streamline from Amsterdam following the 2009 financial crisis, we rebuilt in Malaysia, developed and trained the majority of senior talent in the country, and told anyone who would listen that the country, and the Global South, was rising.

Fifteen years later, that prediction has arrived.

The Global South Rises

For some, Global South still sounds like a euphemism for developing world. For others, it’s the successor term to emerging markets.

In this context, it means the next three billion people, young (half under 30), digitally native, ambitious, and newly mobile.

They grew up watching content from the North, connected by social media, and witnessing a $70 trillion transfer of generational wealth, one few of them will ever participate in.

They want to make games, build tech, and live globally.

This is where the next chapter begins.

When the North came looking for help, it found a willing and able South. That knowledge met capacity, then compounded into scalability. Labor costs enabled creation at speed and volume.

Local developers mastered their craft, started betting on their own IP, and suddenly, local games were global.

Why?

Because lower costs reduced risk.

Because creative constraints disappeared.

Because talent in the South proved what many ignored: great ideas aren’t geographically exclusive.

Just look at Black Myth: Wukong.

What few realized is that this transfer of capability also unleashed a wave of creative destruction, cultural competition exported through IP.

The U.S. perfected it through Hollywood.

South Korea followed with K-Pop and Squid Game.

Now, the Global South is next.

Old School Meets New School

You can’t win a game if you can’t keep playing. Winning requires experience, luck, or both.

The North is expensive. The South needs access.

The balance of the two is the sweet spot if you understand the rules of a multidimensional game.

Post-crash, the world has fused. Opportunity sits at overlapping tables that demand cross-jurisdictional literacy, business acumen, and creative discipline.

If you want to play at this level, you have to be comfortable in Tokyo, Amsterdam, Las Vegas, Bogotá, and Kuala Lumpur.

Your world isn’t your city anymore, it’s the planet.

Understanding how they interrelate is as important as the game itself.

This is where the internet, and the promise of the web, finally deliver: like-minded creators connecting, collaborating, compounding knowledge.

Call it what it is, a grand adventure in game development.

A new lesson in portfolio construction, risk mitigation, and collaboration across cultures and skill sets.

Full Circle

The 24-year cycle has reset.

We’re back where we started, only bigger, riskier, and far more connected.

The market is larger.

The audience is larger.

The stakes are higher.

And so is the reward.

The faces at the companies may have changed, but the perceived problems remain.

Only now, the solutions are breaking apart, and rebuilding somewhere new.

The Global South isn’t coming. It’s here.

And this time, it’s sitting at the table.

Video Games Real Talk is born from those hard-fought, hard-won lessons I wish we’d had when we started. Direct, unfiltered, and no-nonsense, VGRT is real because the business is raw, and the games industry is as real as it gets. In today’s world, you need to know what you’re getting into, not just what you’re dreaming of. Our guests are the best in the industry, sharing their hearts, minds, and experiences for the benefit of us all.

I hope you’ll join us on an adventure unlike any other. Video Games Real Talk is where reality and dreams collide—and thrive.

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Economics plays a significant role in the video game industry because it affects almost every aspect of the business. Understanding economics is crucial to make informed decisions about business strategy.

In Part 2, you will learn:

1. How you can design your life to achieve your dreams

2. How "Winner vs. Loser" thinking is hurting our world

3. About Pippa's time in The White House

4. How diversity of thinking supports entrepreneurial efforts

And so much more!

Pippa's Links:

Website: https://pippamalmgren.co.uk/index.html

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drpippam/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrPippaM

Pippa's books: https://pippamalmgren.co.uk/books.html

Visit our website:

https://videogamesrealtalk.com/

Follow us on our socials: https://twitter.com/VG_RealTalk https://www.instagram.com/vg_realtalk/

https://www.facebook.com/videogamesrealtalk

Follow Alexander on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/starveup

Careers: https://www.streamline-mediagroup.com/careers

About Us:

Video Games Real Talk is hosted by Alexander Fernandez, games industry entrepreneur & CEO of Streamline Media Group. Alexander has a 20-year history of developing & supporting entertainment & enterprise video games for some of the world's best-loved franchises & brands. Giving your host a wealth of experience.

Each episode shares insights from inside the industry. We cover multiple disciplines, perspectives, & expertise from across the world. You can expect candid conversations & access to insider information, trends, & forecasts from leaders & innovators in their field.

VGRT is produced by Krystal Alvarado & David Burton, original music by Pharoh Beats & our YouTube videos are edited by Devon Chew and Morteza Ahmadi.

Economics plays a significant role in the video game industry because it affects almost every aspect of the business. Understanding economics is crucial to make informed decisions about business strategy.

In Part 1, you will learn:

1. Pippa's view on "Shrink-flation", what exactly is that?

2. How video games are affecting the economy

3. Are we currently in WW3?

4. Space based solar power

And so much more!

Pippa's Links:

Website: https://pippamalmgren.co.uk/index.html

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drpippam/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrPippaM

Pippa's books: https://pippamalmgren.co.uk/books.html

Visit our website:

https://videogamesrealtalk.com/

Follow us on our socials: https://twitter.com/VG_RealTalk https://www.instagram.com/vg_realtalk/

https://www.facebook.com/videogamesrealtalk

Follow Alexander on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/starveup

Careers: https://www.streamline-mediagroup.com/careers

About Us:

Video Games Real Talk is hosted by Alexander Fernandez, games industry entrepreneur & CEO of Streamline Media Group. Alexander has a 20-year history of developing & supporting entertainment & enterprise video games for some of the world's best-loved franchises & brands. Giving your host a wealth of experience.

Each episode shares insights from inside the industry. We cover multiple disciplines, perspectives, & expertise from across the world. You can expect candid conversations & access to insider information, trends, & forecasts from leaders & innovators in their field.

VGRT is produced by Krystal Alvarado & David Burton, original music by Pharoh Beats & our YouTube videos are edited by Devon Chew and Morteza Ahmadi.

There are many different ideas of what success really is, so we want to be part of your journey by helping you clearly define what success means for you.

The best way to do this is by recognizing patterns.

Jump into the episode to learn more.

Welcome to Video Games Real Talk!

Visit our website: https://videogamesrealtalk.com/

Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/VG_RealTalk

Follow Alexander on Twitter: https://twitter.com/starveup

Careers: https://www.streamline-mediagroup.com/careers

About Us:

Video Games Real Talk is hosted by Alexander Fernandez, games industry entrepreneur & CEO of Streamline Media Group. Alexander has a 20-year history of developing & supporting entertainment & enterprise video games for some of the world's best-loved franchises & brands gives your hosts a wealth of experience.

Each episode shares insights from inside the industry. We cover multiple disciplines, perspectives, & expertise from across the world. You can expect candid conversations & access to insider information, trends, & forecasts from leaders & innovators in their field.

VGRT is produced by Krystal Alvarado & David Burton, original music by Pharoh Beats & our YouTube videos are edited by Devon Chew and Morteza Ahmadi.

What you will learn:

1. How can we see more leadership in games?

2. How can the video games industry support the youth?

3. Why the industry should disrupt itself.

4. Is the video game industry recession proof?

And so much more!

Shawn's Links: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shawn-layden/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/ShawnLayden

Girls Make Games Scholarship: https://www.gmgsf.org/

Women Who Code: https://www.womenwhocode.com/

Visit our website: https://videogamesrealtalk.com/

Follow us on our socials: https://twitter.com/VG_RealTalk https://www.instagram.com/vg_realtalk/

https://www.facebook.com/videogamesrealtalk

Follow Alexander on Twitter: https://twitter.com/starveup

Careers: https://www.streamline-mediagroup.com/careers

About Us:

Video Games Real Talk is hosted by Alexander Fernandez, games industry entrepreneur & CEO of Streamline Media Group. Alexander has a 20-year history of developing & supporting entertainment & enterprise video games for some of the world's best-loved franchises & brands give your hosts a wealth of experience.

Each episode shares insights from inside the industry. We cover multiple disciplines, perspectives, & expertise from across the world. You can expect candid conversations & access to insider information, trends, & forecasts from leaders & innovators in their field.

VGRT is produced by Krystal Alvarado & David Burton, original music by Pharoh Beats & our YouTube videos are edited by Devon Chew and Morteza Ahmadi.

But what are the first steps in raising capital to secure the lifeblood of the business?

In this episode of VGRT, you will learn what you should do and how you should approach raising capital.

Welcome to Video Games Real Talk!

Visit our website: https://videogamesrealtalk.com/

Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/VG_RealTalk

Follow Alexander on Twitter: https://twitter.com/starveup

Careers: https://www.streamline-mediagroup.com/careers

About Us:

Video Games Real Talk is hosted by Alexander Fernandez, games industry entrepreneur & CEO of Streamline Media Group. Alexander has a 20-year history of developing & supporting entertainment & enterprise video games for some of the world's best-loved franchises & brands gives your hosts a wealth of experience.

Each episode shares insights from inside the industry. We cover multiple disciplines, perspectives, & expertise from across the world. You can expect candid conversations & access to insider information, trends, & forecasts from leaders & innovators in their field.

VGRT is produced by Krystal Alvarado & David Burton, original music by Pharoh Beats & our YouTube videos are edited by Devon Chew.

What you will learn:

1. What exactly is allyship?

2. How we can empower the next generation.

3. How we all can gain an understanding of each other around the world so we can make better games.

And so much more!

TaSh's links: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tashelzie/

Women In Games International website: https://www.getwigi.com/

Visit our website: https://videogamesrealtalk.com/

Follow us on our socials: https://twitter.com/VG_RealTalk

https://www.instagram.com/vg_realtalk/

https://www.facebook.com/videogamesrealtalk

Follow Alexander on Twitter: https://twitter.com/starveup

Careers: https://www.streamline-mediagroup.com/careers

About Us:

Video Games Real Talk is hosted by Alexander Fernandez, games industry entrepreneur & CEO of Streamline Media Group. Alexander has a 20-year history of developing & supporting entertainment & enterprise video games for some of the world's best-loved franchises & brands give your hosts a wealth of experience.

Each episode shares insights from inside the industry. We cover multiple disciplines, perspectives, & expertise from across the world. You can expect candid conversations & access to insider information, trends, & forecasts from leaders & innovators in their field.

VGRT is produced by Krystal Alvarado & David Burton, original music by Pharoh Beats & our YouTube videos are edited by Devon Chew and Morteza Ahmadi.

What do you need to know to master "the game of business"?

There are a few key principles you will walk away with from this episode.

Welcome to Video Games Real Talk!

Visit our website: https://videogamesrealtalk.com/

Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/VG_RealTalk

Follow Alexander on Twitter: https://twitter.com/starveup

Careers: https://www.streamline-mediagroup.com/careers

About Us:

Video Games Real Talk is hosted by Alexander Fernandez, games industry entrepreneur & CEO of Streamline Media Group. Alexander has a 20-year history of developing & supporting entertainment & enterprise video games for some of the world's best-loved franchises & brands give your hosts a wealth of experience.

Each episode shares insights from inside the industry. We cover multiple disciplines, perspectives, & expertise from across the world. You can expect candid conversations & access to insider information, trends, & forecasts from leaders & innovators in their field.

VGRT is produced by Krystal Alvarado & David Burton, original music by Pharoh Beats & our YouTube videos are edited by Devon Chew and Morteza Ahmadi.