Game Industry War Stories – Jay Powell and Larry Kuperman on Budgets, Delays, Mental Health and Why This Industry Gets Under Your Skin:

Game Industry Career Advice! Not every conversation needs a formal agenda. Some of the most useful things shared in the games industry happen in the space between the structured topics, when two people who have been around long enough to have real stories just start talking.

That is what happened when Jay Powell, Founder and CEO of IndieGameBusiness®, sat down for another fireside chat with Larry Kuperman, veteran of the games industry for over twenty-five years and formerly of Nightdive Studios. Larry has been on the show more times than either of them can accurately count. He is nominally retired, though as Jay pointed out, he is doing a worse job of it each month. What came out of the conversation covered game development delays, budgeting, the Blade Runner launch, mental health in the industry, what keeps veteran professionals engaged long after they could have walked away, and why the relationships built at games conferences are not incidental to the work but central to surviving it.

Why Game Delays Are Not a Sign of Failure:

The conversation opened on a topic that surfaces every time a major title slips its release window: why developers consistently underestimate how long things will take, and why that pattern never seems to change even with decades of industry experience as a reference point.

Larry’s framing was direct. Developers are generally people who are technically exceptional and genuinely poor at estimating how long technical work will take. That combination is not a character flaw. It is a structural reality of creative technical work. The gap between what someone thinks they can build and how long it will actually take to build it is a known problem with a known mitigation: build padding into every schedule before committing to it.

His rule of thumb for business development people working alongside developers: whatever number a developer gives you, multiply by one point five. If they say a year, plan for eighteen months. Not because developers are being dishonest, but because the estimate is made without full visibility into what the work will actually require once it is underway.

Jay made the point that even the most resourced productions in the industry face the same problem. GTA VI was delayed twice despite a budget reported at one and a half billion dollars. If Take-Two cannot nail an estimate at that scale, a first-time indie developer working without a professional producer is certainly not going to get it right either. The lesson is not that developers should feel bad about getting this wrong. The lesson is that everyone should plan for it from the beginning.

The Blade Runner Launch and What It Taught Larry About Building in Contingency:

Larry talked openly about one of the harder moments in his time at Nightdive Studios: the launch of Blade Runner. Nightdive has an excellent reputation in the preservation and remastering space, and that reputation is largely deserved. But the Blade Runner launch did not go as well as the team hoped, and Larry was candid about why.

The production schedule did not account for the possibility that half of the QA team would be out simultaneously with COVID. That was not an oversight in the ordinary sense. It was a failure to build enough contingency into the schedule to absorb an event that, while unpredictable in its specifics, belongs to a general category of disruption that experienced producers know to plan for.

The lesson he draws from it applies at every level of development:

• Build contingency into every budget and schedule before finalizing them, not as an afterthought but as a line item
• Treat unknown unknowns as a category that requires space in the plan, even if you cannot name them in advance
• If the contingency is not used, the project comes in under budget, which is a win. If it is used, the project survives something that would otherwise have derailed it.
• Projects always expand to fill the space available. This is not pessimism. It is a pattern that has held across decades of production in games and in other industries.

Larry credited a financial leader he worked with at a medical company for crystallizing this thinking. That person insisted on building a budget line for things we do not know are coming, which she called the allowance for things that cannot be predicted. The discipline of naming that category and giving it actual budget made all the difference when the unpredictable things eventually arrived.

What Business Development People Can Do to Work Better With Developers:

One of the more practical threads in the conversation was Larry’s advice for business development and publishing people who work closely with development teams but do not write code themselves.

His core recommendation is to learn enough about the technology your team uses to be conversant in how developers talk about their work. You do not need to ship a feature. You do not need to complete a full course. But if your studio is building in Unreal Engine, run through an Unreal tutorial. If the team uses Unity or Godot, spend a few hours inside it. The goal is not technical mastery. The goal is the ability to ask better questions, recognize when an estimate is unrealistic, and participate in conversations about scope and timeline with at least some grounding in what the work actually involves.

Jay acknowledged that he has never done this himself but also noted that his many years of watching productions has given him a gut feel for when something is not going to hit its date. The problem, as Larry pointed out, is that this kind of intuition is the result of having watched a lot of things go wrong. It cannot be transferred. It has to be accumulated. For someone earlier in their career, learning the technology is the more accessible path to developing that judgment.

What Larry Has Been Doing Since Leaving Nightdive:

For anyone who has followed Larry’s career, the idea that he is genuinely retired has always seemed optimistic. He confirmed as much.

Since leaving full-time employment at Nightdive, he has been doing the following:

• Recording sessions with the team at Pixel Retentive, a podcast focused on game preservation, with a focus on capturing conversations with the people who made important games rather than just the games themselves
• Running mentorships and informal conversations with developers and business people at various stages of their careers
• Presenting to game development accelerators, including a recent presentation to a Brazilian accelerator on why developers and business people consistently miscommunicate
• Running the IGDA chapter in Las Vegas, which holds regular meetups, brings in speakers including professionals from Epic, and provides community support for developers working in the area
• Thinking seriously about what his time in the industry is actually for at this stage, which he described as wanting to preserve the people who made the games, not just the games themselves

The thread connecting all of it is mentorship and memory. Larry has been in the industry long enough to have watched an entire generation of games get made and a significant portion of the people who made them move on or fade from public view. His current work is an attempt to document that history while the people who lived it are still available to tell it.

Why Industry Relationships Are Not a Side Effect of the Work:

The most personally candid part of the conversation was about mental health and what actually sustains people through the harder periods of a games industry career.

Larry described the last three years as including some of the worst mental health episodes he has experienced in his career. He was specific about what helped: a friend nine hours away by airplane who reached out unprompted to ask if he was okay. The ability to say no honestly, and to have that acknowledged, is something he traced directly to relationships built over years of showing up at the same events and staying in contact between them.

His framing for why the games industry produces unusually close friendships among people who often live far apart and see each other only a few times a year:

• There is almost nobody outside the industry who can fully understand what working inside it is actually like
• The shared experience of building something under constant uncertainty, managing creative and technical complexity simultaneously, and doing it with teams whose success is often unguaranteed, creates a kind of common ground that is hard to replicate elsewhere
• Larry called it shared trauma, which Jay agreed with immediately
• The relationships that result from that common ground are not purely transactional. They function as genuine support systems that carry real weight when things get difficult.

Both Jay and Larry made the point that these relationships tend to eventually produce business outcomes, but that is not what drives them. The friendship comes first. The business follows if the timing aligns. Treating it the other way around, networking as a primarily transactional activity, produces weaker relationships and ultimately weaker results on both the personal and professional side.

The Conference Experience and Why It Still Matters:

Jay and Larry spent time on the specific texture of industry conferences, which both of them have attended for decades and which neither of them can fully step away from even when they try.

Larry mentioned that a recent Gamescom was the first he had missed in years and that he expected to feel the absence significantly when the news started coming out. Jay described the conference experience for someone with a long industry history as something that feels closer to a reunion than a professional obligation. The people you see at GDC or Gamescom are often people you might otherwise see twice a year in person and talk to more regularly over video calls. The in-person time is disproportionately valuable even when the floor itself has become secondary to the hotel lobby meetings and off-floor gatherings that represent most of the actual business activity at large shows.

Larry’s son, who attended an event in the Netherlands with him, watched his father move through a conference for the first time and was surprised by the contrast with how Larry behaved at home. At home, Larry does not talk to anyone. At the conference, everyone knows him and he knows everyone. Larry’s response was that his son’s friends are at school and he sees them every day. Larry’s friends are scattered across the world and he might see them two or three times a year in person. That scarcity makes the time together matter more, not less.

On Retirement, Relevance, and the Pinochle Game:

The conversation ended on a note that was both funny and genuinely honest about what it feels like to be someone who has spent decades building expertise in a specific field and is now trying to figure out how to remain useful without returning to a full-time role.

Larry described the dynamic with an image from his childhood: a friend’s grandfather had a regular Pinochle game, and there was always one old man standing behind the players rather than playing, commenting on every card played, saying he would not have done that. That, Larry said, is the role you end up in when you leave an industry but cannot fully step away from it. You become the person standing behind the players, offering the perspective of someone who has seen a lot of hands.

Jay’s response was that he would probably never retire either, that he would just do less at some point, and that being bored would be worse than staying engaged. The conversation closed with genuine affection between two people who have been showing up in each other’s professional lives for long enough that the friendship is no longer separable from the work.

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Join us for our IndieGameBusiness Deep Dive, taking place on December 9th or hop into the IndieGameBusiness® Discord to connect with Larry and other industry pros.

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Indie Game Studio Productivity – Your Studio Is Busy But Is Anything Getting Done:

Everyone on the team is working. Deadlines are being hit. Tasks are getting checked off. And somehow the game feels no closer to being finished than it did three months ago. This is one of the most common and least talked about problems in indie game development, and it has almost nothing to do with how hard people are working.

Benjamin Carcich, founder of Valarin, Inc. and creator of Building Better Games, spent nearly a decade at Riot Games thinking about what makes leaders and studios effective before leaving to help studios of all sizes fix exactly this problem. He joined Dan Long, Podcast Host for IndieGameBusiness®, for a conversation that covered game vision, estimation, external development, the real cost of context switching, and the production habits that separate studios that finish games from those that stay perpetually busy.

From Army Officer to Riot Games Producer:

Benjamin’s path into game development is not the one most people expect. He was an Army officer before he entered the industry, and the questions he was already asking in that environment, what does good leadership actually look like, how do leaders help other people get things done, turned out to be exactly the questions that mattered most when he got to Riot.

He joined Riot as an associate producer without fully knowing what he was walking into and spent nearly a decade there working across a wide range of projects. The through line throughout was leadership: how it shapes organizations, what it means to be genuinely effective rather than just busy, and why so many well-resourced teams still fail to make real progress.

When he left Riot, just before COVID, he founded Valarin, Inc. with the specific goal of bringing that thinking to studios outside the AAA world. Over the past six years he has worked with studios of nearly every size and platform, running training programs, coaching individual leaders, and consulting on production systems for teams that know something is not working but cannot quite name what it is.

The Real Reason Busy Studios Do Not Make Progress:

The question Dan asked to open the conversation is one that almost every studio founder has lived through: how can a studio have everyone working forty hours a week, hitting deadlines, and completing tasks, and still feel like the game is not getting any closer to being done?
Benjamin’s answer was direct. The biggest reason is misaligned game vision.

It is entirely possible for every person on a team to believe they are working toward the same goal while actually pulling in meaningfully different directions. Game vision, the shared understanding of what the game is, what experience it creates, and why anyone is going to care about it, is harder to communicate and maintain than most studios realize. Research by Graham McAllister, who has studied this problem academically and interviewed dozens of studios, found that teams which believed they were aligned rarely were when he actually broke down what each person thought the game was trying to do.

The instinctive response to this problem is to add more. More people, more contractors, more features, more levels, more assets. Benjamin described this as trying to out-stuff the problem. The work piles up, the team gets busier, and the game still does not move toward the experience it is supposed to create because nobody has solved the underlying problem of everyone going to the same place.

Why Alignment Is Not a One-Time Achievement:

Even studios that do the work of establishing a clear game vision at the start of a project face a problem that Benjamin described with unusual precision: alignment decays.

Humans change as they work. New information comes in. People solve problems in slightly different ways. What felt like a shared understanding six months ago has drifted by the time the team is six months further into development. This is not a failure of commitment or communication. It is a predictable human pattern that requires a consistent, ongoing response.

Benjamin’s framing for what leaders need to do about this:

• Treat alignment as a continuous exercise rather than a milestone that gets completed and checked off
• Watch what people actually build and ask why, because the gap between what someone made and what you expected is often the clearest signal that someone is heading somewhere slightly different
• Course correct early and often rather than allowing drift to accumulate into something that requires major rework to fix
• Recognize that alignment is a leadership responsibility but not exclusively a leadership problem. Everyone on the team has some responsibility for understanding and contributing to the shared direction

The Most Important Thing Is Often Getting the Least Attention:

A pattern Benjamin sees repeatedly across studios of all sizes is that the most important thing in the game, the mechanic or experience that defines why anyone would want to play it, receives a disproportionately small share of the team’s attention. Other things get worked on because they are visible, because they fill a task list, because they feel productive. The core of the game gets five or ten percent of the effort when it should be getting the majority.

His recommendation is to have an explicit, honest conversation about what the most important thing in the game actually is, and then verify whether the team’s time allocation reflects that. The answer to that question should influence how every sprint, every week, and every planning session is structured. If it does not, the studio is optimizing for looking busy rather than making progress toward the experience that will determine whether the game succeeds or fails.

How Estimation Actually Works and Why Studios Get It Wrong:

Benjamin runs a dedicated course on estimation, and the section of the conversation about it covered something that most indie developers learn slowly and painfully: estimation is a skill that requires specific practices to do well, and most studios do not use those practices.

His core framework for improving estimation:

• Track actuals against estimates consistently. If you estimate that something will take two days and it takes five, that gap is information. Ignoring it means the next estimate will be just as wrong. Recording what actually happened and comparing it to what you predicted is the foundation of getting better at estimation over time.
• Separate uncertainty from the estimate itself. A task that involves familiar technology in a known codebase carries less uncertainty than a task that requires building something entirely new. Treating all tasks as equally certain produces estimates that are wrong in unpredictable ways. Explicitly naming what you do not know allows for more accurate scoping.
• Use cone of uncertainty thinking. The further out an estimate is, the wider the range of possible outcomes. Treating a six-month-away milestone with the same confidence as a two-week milestone is a planning error. Build range into longer-horizon estimates rather than pretending precision is possible at that distance.
• Estimate as a team rather than in isolation. When multiple people with relevant knowledge contribute to an estimate, the collective output is more accurate than any single person’s guess. It also builds shared understanding of what a task actually involves, which helps with alignment.

Context Switching Is More Expensive Than Most Studios Acknowledge:

One of the most practically actionable points in the conversation was Benjamin’s take on context switching. Most creative and technical work in game development, and especially programming, requires a significant ramp-up period to get into a productive state. That ramp-up gets destroyed every time attention is pulled away to something else.

The research Benjamin referenced suggests that regaining full productive focus after an interruption can take anywhere from fifteen to forty-five minutes. In a workday full of meetings, Slack messages, and competing priorities, a developer might never achieve the sustained focus that the most complex and important work requires.

His practical recommendations for reducing the cost of context switching:

• Group meetings into concentrated blocks rather than spreading them across the day
• Protect extended blocks of uninterrupted time for complex tasks, particularly engineering and design work that requires deep focus
• Be deliberate about which interruptions are actually urgent and which only feel urgent
• Recognize that asking someone a quick question has a cost that extends well beyond the time the answer takes

Working With External Developers and How to Do It Well:

Many indie studios reach a point where they bring in external contractors or development partners, and Benjamin covered the three main models for how that relationship can be structured:

• Time and materials. The least specified model. The studio pays for time and hope that the time produces value. Works best when the goal is not yet fully defined but communication is close and feedback loops are short.
• Milestone-based. Requires more specificity about what done means. More predictable in terms of cost but requires clear scoping and openness to negotiating what a milestone actually involves before work begins.
• Asset-based. The most tightly specified model. A specific deliverable at a fixed price. Requires exceptional clarity on exactly what is being requested, because anything underspecified will result in a delivered asset that does not fit and still has to be paid for.

Regardless of which model is used, Benjamin’s consistent recommendation is to bring external developers as close to the team as possible. Share game vision with them. Include them in meetings where feasible. Give them the context behind what they have been asked to build.

His reasoning is straightforward: the more an external developer understands why they are building something, the better the moment-to-moment decisions they will make while building it. Treating contractors as purely external, giving them a spec and waiting for the output, produces work that fits the letter of the request but often misses the spirit of it. The practical limits of this approach are time zones, language barriers, and contract length. But wherever those constraints allow it, drawing external developers closer to the team produces better outcomes.

Want more insights like this? :

Join us for our IndieGameBusiness Deep Dive, taking place on December 9th or hop into the IndieGameBusiness® Discord to connect with Ben and other industry pros.

The IndieGameBusiness® podcast drops new episodes regularly, covering the business side of making and selling games. Subscribe to the newsletter to get episodes, Discord events, Discounts, and industry news straight to your inbox. Subscribe now

Raising Money. Here Is What Nobody Told Us: Rob Carroll on Funding Rollcraft Through WeFunder –

Raising money for an indie game studio sounds like the hard part. Rob Carroll, CEO of Rollcraft, is here to tell you that raising the money is actually the easier thing to understand. It is everything that surrounds the raise, the preparation before it, the all-consuming reality of running it, and the structural decisions that need to be in place before the first dollar comes in, that nobody walks you through in advance.

Rob joined Dan Long, Podcast Host for IndieGameBusiness®, for a candid conversation about how Rollcraft raised eighty-seven thousand dollars from sixty-seven investors through WeFunder, what the experience actually felt like from the inside, what he would do differently, and the single most important thing a founder needs to understand before they take the first dollar from anyone.

What Rollcraft Is and Why the Pitch Matters –

Before getting into the fundraising mechanics, Rob shared the thirty-second pitch he used throughout the campaign, which is worth understanding on its own merits as an example of clear, audience-specific positioning.

Rollcraft builds short-form role-playing games for people who love deep, immersive RPG experiences but no longer have the time for them. The concept is to take the kind of rich, story-driven content found in games like World of Warcraft and condense it to fit whatever time a player actually has, whether that is two hours for a solid session or five minutes while waiting for a bus stop. The game adapts to the player’s schedule rather than requiring the player to adapt to the game.

That pitch clarity was not accidental. Rob’s background is in production and game design rather than engineering, and the ability to articulate what a game is and why it matters in thirty seconds or less turned out to be one of the most important skills in running a successful fundraise.

Why Rollcraft Chose WeFunder Over Other Funding Options –

Before committing to WeFunder, Rob and his team evaluated the realistic options available to them:

• Bootstrapping entirely through sweat equity and personal funds
• Pursuing venture capital investment from institutional investors
• Running a Kickstarter campaign with backer rewards and game perks
• Using WeFunder for equity crowdfunding with revenue sharing

What separated WeFunder from Kickstarter in their thinking was the nature of what investors received. Rather than game skins, early access, or physical merchandise, WeFunder investors become actual part owners of the company through a SAFE agreement. Rollcraft added a revenue share component on top of that, meaning investors received both equity and a share of revenue. Rob’s view was that this created a genuinely attractive proposition for investors rather than a transactional exchange of money for perks.

The campaign raised eighty-seven thousand dollars from sixty-seven investors, with individual contributions ranging from one hundred dollars at the lower end to fifteen or twenty thousand dollars from larger contributors. All of that is publicly visible on WeFunder.com/Rollcraft.

How the Cap Table Actually Works With WeFunder –

One of the most practically useful things Rob explained is how WeFunder handles the legal and administrative complexity of having sixty-seven investors without putting sixty-seven names on the company’s cap table.

The SAFE agreements, the legal paperwork, and the investor relations are all handled through WeFunder as an intermediary. What appears on Rollcraft’s cap table is a single WeFunder entity rather than sixty-seven individual names. That single entity represents the entire pool of WeFunder investors, keeping the cap table clean and manageable while still giving each investor their proper legal standing and documentation.

For a studio that does not have an in-house legal team or the budget to process individual SAFEs for dozens of investors independently, this structure is a significant practical advantage. WeFunder also provided account managers and marketing support throughout the campaign rather than simply hosting the page and stepping back.

Raising Money: What Nobody Told Rob Before the Fundraise Started –

This is where the conversation got most valuable for anyone considering a similar path. Rob was prepared for a fundraise to be demanding. He was not prepared for how completely it would consume everything else.

His description of what running the campaign actually felt like:

• Raising money becomes a full-time job the moment the campaign goes live
• Time for design work, writing documentation, and everything else that makes game development enjoyable essentially disappears
• Content creation for the campaign is relentless. The fundraise is a content-eating machine that needs new stories, new art, new updates, and new reasons for investors to pay attention on a constant cadence
• Consistent messaging to investors is not optional. Going quiet mid-campaign kills momentum and investor confidence
• Nobody gives money because your pitch was good once. The attention has to be maintained throughout

Rob said he thought he understood this going in and was still more surprised by the reality than he expected. If a studio founder is thinking about running a campaign while also staying meaningfully involved in development, Rob’s honest advice is to recalibrate those expectations before starting.

The Content Problem and the Community Problem –

Two specific gaps Rob identified that cost him time and stress during the campaign are worth understanding separately because they are both addressable before a campaign launches.

The content problem is straightforward: he did not have enough assets ready before the campaign started. Art, character designs, dice renders, story previews, all of the visual and narrative material that keeps a campaign feeling alive and progressing needed to be produced in real time during the raise rather than being drawn from a prepared backlog. His recommendation is to build a significant content reserve before launch so that campaign updates can be published without putting immediate pressure on the development team.

The community problem is harder. Rob described it honestly as a chicken-and-egg situation. A large, engaged community dramatically improves the chances of a successful fundraise because those people are already invested in wanting the game to exist. But building that community requires having something to show them, which is harder to do before the game exists. Developers who have shipped a previous title and built a following around it have a meaningful structural advantage when they go to raise money for the next project. For a first-time campaign without that existing base, building community has to happen in parallel with everything else, which means doing two full-time jobs simultaneously.

What Needs to Be in Place Before You Start –

Rob was asked for the single hardest lesson he learned that could save another founder significant time, money, and stress. His answer was about infrastructure rather than strategy.

Everything that is not directly about raising money needs to be fully set up and operational before the campaign launches. His specific list:

• Company legal structure, whether a C-Corp or LLC, registered and in good standing
• Business bank accounts open and functioning
• A lawyer and accountant identified and accessible for questions that will come up unexpectedly
• All company documents organized and ready to share with investors who request them
• The WeFunder campaign page reviewed and finalized before going live, not revised mid-campaign

The reason this matters is the same reason the content problem matters: once the campaign is live, all available attention and energy needs to go toward investor outreach, content creation, and maintaining momentum. Any time spent setting up the legal structure, opening a bank account, or hunting for an accountant during the campaign is time directly subtracted from the activities that drive investment. Rob described the mental model as building the airplane while flying it, which is exactly the situation you want to avoid.

He also noted that WeFunder’s documentation is publicly available and worth reading thoroughly before deciding whether or not to use the platform. Even if a studio ultimately chooses a different path, the WeFunder documentation is a useful orientation to what equity crowdfunding involves and what needs to be prepared.

Is There a Difference Between Raising Money and Funding a Business –

Dan asked whether there is a meaningful strategic difference between successfully raising money and successfully funding a business. Rob’s view was that the two are effectively the same thing for a studio at Rollcraft’s stage.

Without external investment, the options are sweat equity and bootstrapping, which can work but limits the speed of development and the ability to pay people for their time. The investment coming in is what makes it possible to hire, to commission art, to run user acquisition, and to execute on the things that turn a game from a project into a product in market. The raise is not separate from the business strategy. It is the mechanism that funds the business strategy.

What Rob Would Do Differently and What Comes Next –

Asked directly what he would change if he were starting the campaign over, Rob identified two things: more content prepared in advance, and a larger community already built before launch. Both come back to the same principle he kept returning to throughout the conversation: have more ready before you start.

On what comes next, Rob was equally direct. Rollcraft was approaching market at the time of the recording. The plan is to open a second WeFunder campaign in the coming months to raise additional funds for expansion, further development, and user acquisition. His expectation going in is the same as it was for the first campaign: it will be all-consuming, it will require the same sustained content cadence and investor attention, and the result will be worth the work.

The loop he described, raise, close, start the next raise, is one that experienced CEOs in the startup world would recognize immediately. The fundraise does not end when the campaign closes. It transitions into the next phase of growth, which requires its own capital, its own pitch, and its own focused effort.

Want more insights like this? –

Join us for our IndieGameBusiness Deep Dive, taking place on December 9th from 9am – 5pm Eastern or hop into the IndieGameBusiness® Discord to connect with Rob and other industry pros.

The IndieGameBusiness® podcast drops new episodes regularly, covering the business side of making and selling games. Subscribe to the newsletter to get episodes, Discord events, Discounts, and industry news straight to your inbox. Subscribe now

Latin America Indie Game Development- How Hugo Castro Is Building the LATAM Industry From the Ground Up:

Hugo Castro has spent eighteen years building something the Mexican games industry did not have when he was growing up: a genuine on-ramp for developers who want to make games professionally. As CEO of BC Media Lab and co-founder of Gamacon, Hugo runs one of the most active and internationally connected game development ecosystems in Latin America, touching everything from accelerator programs and private investment to government relations and a Mexican wrestling game featuring six real-life luchadores.

He joined Jay Powell, Founder of IndieGameBusiness®, for a fireside chat covering how Gamacon started, what BC Media Lab actually does, why the Latin American game industry is underestimated by publishers and investors, what governments get wrong when they try to support game development, and what needs to change for the region to fully realize what it is capable of building.

From an Arcade in a Tortilla Store to Eighteen Years in the Industry:

Hugo’s first encounter with a video game was at four or five years old in Mexicali, Mexico, where an arcade machine appeared inside a tortilla store. He started volunteering to run his family’s errands specifically because he knew the change he would receive was enough to play. That early obsession never faded, but the path to working in games was not straightforward.

When Hugo was choosing his university major in the early nineties, it was nearly impossible to study game development in Mexico. He crossed the border into Calexico, California to search the public library for books on game development. There were none. He experimented with GW Basic on his own. Eventually he pursued engineering, choosing cybernetics and electronics because it was the closest thing to games-adjacent education he could access.

He worked in manufacturing plants for years until a sleepless night in 2007 when he decided he had to find a way into the games industry. The decision was not just personal. He wanted to create the opportunities for young Mexican developers that had not existed for him. That conviction became Gamacon.

What Gamacon Is and How It Has Evolved Over Eighteen Years:

Gamacon started as a consumer and industry hybrid event, described by Hugo as a vision of Comic-Con meets GDC. Actors, composers, and entertainers shared an expo floor with developers and industry professionals. Over time, the team concluded that trying to serve everyone was diluting the event’s value. They made a deliberate shift.

Today Gamacon is a focused business and investment event with no general expo floor. The programming is built around B2B connections, investment conversations, and professional development for developers who want to operate at an industry level. The event runs four through the sixth of November and brings in speakers, private investors, government representatives from the Mexican Ministry of Economy, and international industry figures.

Jay Powell, who has attended for years, made an observation that captures what Gamacon actually is for the people who go: he could trace several significant deals from the last five years directly to introductions made at Gamacon. On paper, an event of that size might seem like a smaller regional conference. In practice, it produces real business outcomes because of the quality of the room and the intentionality of the matchmaking.

BC Media Lab -The Three Business Lines Powering Hugo’s Day-to-Day Work:

Gamacon is a nonprofit that Hugo and his team run out of genuine commitment to the industry. BC Media Lab is his professional operation, built around three distinct lines of work:

• Game development. BC Media Lab builds its own titles, including a Mexican wrestling game featuring six real luchadores and a growing suite of AI tools. Hugo is direct about using AI, framing it not as a replacement for talent but as a way to extend what a team can accomplish.
• Business development. Hugo and his business partner Rich Viso travel internationally to find projects and connect them with specialized partners across the BC Media Lab network. When a porting project comes in, it goes to a specialized porting team in another part of Mexico. The model is built around matching needs to expertise rather than building every capability in-house.
• Accelerator and incubator programs. When BC Media Lab identifies a project worth investing in, they bring it into an accelerator program with mentorship from developers who have more than twenty-five years of experience, access to private investors, and support for either finding a publisher or building a self-publishing communication strategy. Beyond their own portfolio, BC Media Lab runs accelerator programs for governments in Mexico, Colombia, and potentially Uzbekistan and Uruguay.

Why Latin America Is Being Underestimated by Publishers and Investors:

One of the most pointed threads in the conversation was the gap between the talent and output coming from Latin American game studios and the attention that region receives from publishers, scouts, and investors internationally.

Jay and Hugo both named the same structural problem: the people making acquisition and investment decisions have not visited. Publishers who have been to Mexico City, Guadalajara, Monterrey, Tijuana, Buenos Aires, or Bogota tend to come back with a very different read on what is being built there. Publishers and scouts who have not visited tend to discount the region because it is outside their existing travel and relationship patterns.

Hugo’s view is that this will change, and that it will change because of success stories. A single well-documented game that is made with accelerator guidance, reaches its market successfully, and builds a public track record will attract followers. The model is to create that first story, document it thoroughly, and let it do the work of shifting the perception that Latin America is not a serious games market.

Jay’s take on what it takes to accelerate that shift was equally direct: publishers and scouts need to actually go. The cost of a trip is the barrier, and in some cases that means governments need to fund initial visits to give international industry figures a reason to come the first time. Once they have been, the relationship tends to continue under its own momentum.

What Governments Get Wrong When They Try to Support Game Development:

Hugo works closely with the Mexican government and has run accelerator programs funded by public money across multiple countries. His critique of how governments typically approach game development funding is specific and worth understanding.

The most common mistake is requiring developers to make culturally themed games in exchange for funding. The intention is to ensure that public money produces something with cultural value. The practical outcome is games that do not reflect what the developers actually wanted to make, are often under-resourced relative to their ambitions, and rarely find the audience they need to succeed commercially.

Hugo’s argument is that developers who are supported to make the game they actually want to make will naturally embed cultural elements into that work. Forcing a cultural mandate onto a development team produces a constrained product. Freeing developers to pursue their genuine creative direction produces better games, and better games generate the visibility and international attention that governments ultimately want.

His practical recommendations for government-supported programs:

• Fund developers to make the games they want to make rather than prescribing cultural themes as a condition of funding
• Send developers to international conferences and events to build visibility and connections, which compounds in value over time
• Design accelerator and incubator programs with input from people who have actually made and shipped games, not politicians or business people without direct industry experience
• Understand that the game industry carries risk comparable to other sectors governments already invest in, and treat it accordingly rather than applying a higher standard of certainty

Hugo acknowledged that this perspective sometimes creates tension with government partners who get upset when the program design is criticized. His position is that a program built by people who do not understand game development will waste everyone’s time and resources, regardless of the budget behind it.

What Gamacon Offers That Larger Conferences Cannot:

Jay’s endorsement of Gamacon throughout the conversation was grounded in something specific: the relationships it produces and the business outcomes that follow from them. His reasoning for consistently recommending smaller, focused events to developers applies directly to what Gamacon is built to be.

At a conference of twenty or thirty thousand people, the volume of interactions makes depth difficult. Everyone is moving fast, juggling back-to-back meetings, and the conversations that happen in passing rarely have time to develop into anything. At a focused event with the right room, the same people are together long enough for real conversations to happen.

Gamacon’s B2B structure, investment access, government presence, and the quality of speakers and attendees Hugo described for the November event make it a genuinely useful destination for developers who are at a stage where business conversations matter. Attendees expected for the upcoming edition include speakers like Daniel Kendrick, investors from Hugo’s private investor network, and representatives from the Mexican Ministry of Economy.

How to Get Involved With Gamacon and BC Media Lab:

Gamacon runs November four through the sixth. Developers interested in attending can reach out directly to Hugo Castro on LinkedIn for information and to discuss what the event offers for their specific situation.

BC Media Lab considers game projects for investment and accelerator support on an ongoing basis. Hugo and his team are looking for projects with commercial potential that can benefit from mentorship, investor access, and structured support for reaching the market. Developers interested in the accelerator program or business development partnership can also connect through LinkedIn.

Want more insights like this?:

Join us for our IndieGameBusiness Sessions, taking place on September 30th from 9am – 5pm Eastern or hop into the IndieGameBusiness® Discord to connect with Hugo and other industry pros.

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