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💡Two major Chinese games industry outlets picked up my piece on China’s mobile dominance. 35k+ reads. To say I’m excited is an understatement. Sure, I read both pieces carefully. ✅What they confirmed The insiders agreed on the core thesis. The structural advantages are real. The talent system logic holds. The Skymoons story, where Values Value helped build the Kyiv art studio that contributed to a $190M acquisition, landed as a credible case study. Not an outsider’s guess. GameLook added something I didn’t have in my piece: Supercell president Sara Bach and CEO Ilkka Paananen both saying Chinese developers are faster, more data-driven, and ahead on AI adoption. ❎What they pushed back on Two points. First, the shift work framing. GameLook noted that multi-shift operations apply more to customer service than dev teams. Fair. The underlying point still stands: Chinese studios sustain live ops intensity Western studios cannot match. Second, survivorship bias. The domestic market is brutal. The mini-game track alone sees 10,000 new submissions a month with a success rate in the low single digits per thousand. I didn’t write about that. I wrote about what the survivors built. The brutality of domestic competition explains why they are built differently. It is not the counterargument. 🫶Wow, I’m humbled by the response. Both in the West and now in China. If the industry I was writing about is actively engaging with the thesis, maybe I was asking the right questions.

🎮 Values Value is hiring a Community Manager for a major mobile UGC sandbox project! A leading publisher with multiple top-performing titles is looking for an experienced Community Manager to join their internal team working on a mobile UGC sandbox game, a platform where players create worlds, mods, and content. 📊 The scale: 200M+ installs, 3M+ DAU, and a community growing every day. The mission: keep engagement high, expand the player base, and turn a massive audience into a thriving, tightly-knit ecosystem. 🔧 What you'll do: ▫️Maintain daily activity in Discord and social media ▫️Run contests, giveaways, and events ▫️Communicate directly with players (chats, comments, feedback) ▫️Come up with new engagement mechanics ▫️Support moderators in keeping the community healthy ▫️Collect player feedback and share it with the team ✅ What we're looking for: ▫️Experience with large communities (100,000+ users) ▫️A track record of running contests and events with strong response ▫️Creative approach to community development ▫️Hands-on experience communicating with players, including conflict resolution ▫️Understanding of UGC and the creator economy ▫️Confident work with Discord and other social platforms ▫️Ability to handle negativity and crisis situations ➕ Nice to have: ▫️Background in gaming or UGC projects (Roblox, Minecraft, etc.) ▫️Awareness of TikTok/YouTube trends ▫️Experience with content or creator monetization 🎁 What's on offer: ▫️Freedom to experiment ▫️Transparent management and open team communication ▫️Full-time, remote with optional coworking ▫️Flexible schedule ▫️Paid vacation and sick leave Apply via the link 👇 https://lnkd.in/da-uMUzD #CommunityManager #CommunityManagement #CommunityBuilding #DiscordCommunity #SocialMediaManager #GameJobs #GamingJobs #GameDev #MobileGaming #GamingCommunity #UGC #UserGeneratedContent #CreatorEconomy #SandboxGames #RemoteJob #Hiring #NowHiring #JobOpening #FullTime

20 people. $1 billion. In less than a year. Loom Games didn’t just build a great mobile game. They built a proof of concept the games industry has been avoiding for years. We spent a decade thinking bigger teams meant more ambition. More people meant more seriousness. More seriousness meant more investment. Supercell tried to tell us differently in 2010s. The industry listened, applauded — and mostly went back to building org charts. What’s changed now isn’t the principle. It’s the conditions. AI has widened the window. The overhiring boom has passed. And a 20-person studio just hit a billion-dollar valuation. Here’s what I think founders are still getting wrong: 1. Hiring because it feels like progress Growth isn’t headcount. It’s what your team actually produces. 2. Filling seats instead of raising the bar Every person you hire either makes the team stronger or dilutes it. There’s no neutral. 3. Thinking team size is a signal to investors The most sophisticated acquirers — see: Scopely — are increasingly drawn to studios that produce more with less. 4. Ignoring the difference between building and operating Large live service teams exist for a reason. But that reason doesn’t apply when you’re creating something new. Supercell understood this and formally split their company into two divisions in 2023. 5. Treating the layoff wave as a temporary correction It may not be temporary. Nine years of employment data tells me something more structural has shifted — and Loom Games makes it harder to dismiss. The question isn’t how many people you need. It’s whether every person you have is someone you genuinely can’t afford to lose. I wrote about this in full for PocketGamer.biz — the Supercell precedent, the survivorship bias argument, and three things founders should do differently. Link in comments. 👏 tagging Kübra Gündoğan and Emre Çelik , whose story is at the centre of this.

For years I told women in game dev: just ask for more. I was wrong. Not because women don't deserve to ask boldly - they do. But because that advice quietly puts the weight of a structural problem on individual shoulders. And the data won't let me say that anymore. At C-level in Europe, women in games earn 22% less than men. Their desired salaries? 24% lower. The salary they desire is actually lower than men actually get! And the gap isn't just in the paycheck. It starts before the negotiation even begins. On International Women's Day, I won’t celebrate how far we've come. I'm here to show exactly how the math works against us and what actually needs to change. #WomenInGames #AskGap #GameDev #PayEquity

Today VALUES VALUE: Recruitment for Game Development Industry turns 9, and it feels like the right moment to pause: not to celebrate milestones or numbers, but to reflect on who we’ve become. We started as a recruitment company. We’re still great at recruitment. But that’s no longer the full story. Over the years, we grew into something broader and, honestly, more meaningful. We work with people, but also with systems. With careers, but also with data. With ambition, but always with ethics in mind. Today Values Value is: • recruitment that understands markets, not just CVs • marketing and talent analysis grounded in real data, not hype • research that helps the industry see itself more clearly • initiatives that grow people and teams • support for those who need help. We believe in a human-centric, data-driven approach. Not “human vs data”, not “intuition vs numbers” - but respect for both. We care about: • healthy career choices instead of fast placements • sustainable teams instead of burnout-driven growth • transparency instead of manipulation • long-term value instead of short-term wins The industry we work in is complex, fast, sometimes ruthless. That’s exactly why values matter - not as a slogan, but as daily decisions. Nine years later, I’m proud that we still ask hard questions: • SHOULD we do this, not just CAN we? • Is this good for people, not just metrics? • What kind of industry are we helping to build? Thank you to our team, partners, clients, students, and peers who choose depth over noise and trust over shortcuts. Onward — thoughtfully, responsibly, and very much human. 💜💟💜