Building Games That People Actually Want to Play
We started in 2018 because we kept seeing mobile games that looked great but felt awful to play. After spending years working with teams who valued downloads over player retention, we decided to take a different approach. Every project we take on begins with one question: would we want to spend our evenings playing this?
How We Got Here
Back in 2017, I was consulting for a studio that had just spent eighteen months building a puzzle game. Beautiful art, solid mechanics, decent music. It launched to 50,000 downloads in the first week. By week three, daily active users dropped to 3%.
The problem wasn't the game itself—it was that nobody had tested whether people would keep playing past level twelve. The difficulty spike was brutal, and the reward loop made no sense. Classic case of building in a vacuum.
That experience stuck with me. A year later, when Kieran Thorne and I were discussing what kind of work we actually wanted to do, we kept coming back to the same idea: mobile games needed less ego and more iteration. Less "trust the vision" and more "let's see what players do."
What Actually Matters to Us
These aren't corporate values we printed on a poster. They're the things that determine whether we take on a project and how we approach the work.
Player Retention Over Launch Numbers
Anyone can engineer a viral launch. We care about whether people are still playing three months later. That means different design decisions, different monetization approaches, and way more time spent on mid-game content.
Honest Performance Metrics
When something isn't working, we say so. We've walked away from projects where clients wanted us to ignore retention data because it conflicted with their timeline. Your game's success depends on reality, not optimism.
Cross-Platform Consistency
A game that plays great on iPhone 15 but stutters on Android mid-range devices isn't really cross-platform. We test on the devices your actual players use, not just the ones we wish they had.
Who's Actually Doing the Work
Small team by design. We've found that mobile game development works better with people who've shipped multiple titles and know what problems to expect. Everyone here has dealt with app store rejections, last-minute platform updates, and players who find exploits you never imagined.
Kieran Thorne
Spent eight years at mid-size studios before starting this. Has strong opinions about touch controls and will absolutely redesign your UI if the tap targets are too small. Previously worked on three titles that each crossed ten million downloads.
Astrid Voclain
Comes from a background in behavioral psychology, which makes her particularly good at spotting why players abandon games. Runs our playtesting sessions and has no patience for design decisions that prioritize aesthetics over usability.
Let's Talk About Your Project
If you're working on a mobile game and want honest feedback about what's working and what isn't, reach out. We typically start new projects in early 2026 and prefer clients who value iteration over rushing to launch.