Going the distance
to build games
people love.

When the traffic model broke I had two doors. One: lay off most of the team and pivot to burst-session mechanics we had no experience in and no appetite for. Two: reuse the engine, reskin Rome to Sengoku Japan, move to a leaner model, and move fast. We greenlit Daisho on 23 January 2023 and shipped it that June — concept to live in five months. It kept the team whole. Whether it beat handing the rest of the money back to investors, I still can’t tell you.

Early 2023, Google Play swapped most of its organic auto-collections for ad inventory. To a player the home page looked identical; to us, free traffic had silently become paid traffic. A low-LTV player from Vietnam covers his keep against staff and servers — bolt a CPI onto his head and he’s a hole in the P&L.

The launch went well enough that I could have raised again at a $60M valuation. I passed — we had cash in the bank, inflation was high, and I wanted to build, not dilute. Months later the ad market turned and the number would never come back. I’d make the same call and I’d lose sleep over it again.

My first real touch with mobile was a MOBA that couldn’t pay for itself. Marketing budgets were pulled, so I had to learn organic growth or watch it die. That necessity became the method: one proven survival-RPG template, reskinned into settings the big spenders find too small to bother with — Rome, then Sengoku Japan, then the Viking north.