Current Whereabouts

Since returning to my native Finland in January 2022, after almost a decade abroad, I have been working as an independent consultant through my own company, JR Game Consulting.

Work History

I am an experienced game industry executive with 20+ years of experience in games and software development. I have a track record of building studios and teams, as well as shipping quality games on time and on budget.

To me, true leadership is always about PEOPLE first and foremost. It is about enabling and empowering them, but also about challenging them to improve: To develop and improve themselves, the game/product, as well as the studio and their working environment. In my opinion, turning a group of individuals into a team is the number one job of any leader. Once you have a strong team, driven to improve, all you need to do is to support them and they will accomplish amazing things that are beyond any one of us individually.

Building great teams, where individuals trust each other and work together to accomplish more than they could alone, is what drives me. In general, I believe that anything worth doing is worth doing well. I am a big believer in continuous, incremental improvement, and have hard time settling for good enough. When I see something broken I just have to fix it. I have great passion to develop myself, my team, my workplace, the ways of working as well as the product itself to new heights. The best way to demotivate me is to stop me from improving things around me.

To find out more details about my work history, visit my LinkedIn page here.

Achievements in a Nutshell

• Project teams from 3 to 250+ people

• Budgets up to 70M€+

• In charge of productions of all sizes, from 3 months to 3+ years

• Worked at start-ups, independent developers, publisher-owned studios & at the headquarters of a big multi-national

• Built studios from scratch and scaled one from 2 people to 150+ people in few years

• Seen growth patterns from organic to stupid fast

• Worked with 3rd party publishers & platform owners

• Introduced agile to multiple different studios (certified scrum master & product owner)

• Production & leadership roles from Associate Producer to Executive Producer, from Development Director to COO

• Part of leadership teams, from studio leadership teams to start-up executive teams

• New IP development, such as Alan Wake & Quantum Break

• Worked on well-established franchises, such as Sega Rally, Need for Speed, World of Tanks & Runescape

• Worked in distributed development projects, spanning multiple studios, companies, countries and even continents

• Long-time IGDA Finland lead coordinator & advisory board chair; volunteering and coordinating work of other volunteers

My Background

I am an experienced game production and game studio leader who has been part of the games industry for 20+ years, more than 10 of it abroad. I have lived and worked in Finland, US, UK, Sweden and Cyprus. I have spent considerable time onsite, working with teams in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, as well as Czech Republic.

In that time, I have

• Seen the two waves of mobile gaming, the pre-iPhone era J2ME games, as well as the post-iPhone free-to-play era.

• Taken part in two console transitions

• Seen the growth of a Finnish start-up and its acquisition by a US company from the inside, been in the leadership team of another start-up which ended up listed on Nasdaq First North Finland marketplace before ultimately being acquired by Netflix

• Participated in the production of the 3 biggest media productions (at the time of their launch) to come out of Finland (Alan Wake 1 & 2, as well as Quantum Break)

• Helped a huge international publishers start new AAA PC/console studios in Sweden and in UK

• Grown IGDA Finland into one of the most successful IGDA chapters in the world over a period of 5 years, before helping it become a registered association under Finnish law (Rekisteröity Yhdistys) and a fully independent chapter with a contractual relationship with the main IGDA body

I am a certified scrum master and scrum product owner and have been part of implementing agile practices into action in multiple studios. I am also trained in scaled agile practices, including Nexus.

Throughout all that, I have seen the growth of the Finnish games industry into the vibrant ecosystem it is today and have maintained a track record of shipping quality games on time and on budget. 

My Philosophy

I believe the mark of a great leader is the ability to make the decision within responsible time even with limited information available, to provide the team with a clear common goal and yet is able to admit if he was wrong and change direction for the good of the team and the project.

I believe that anything worth doing is worth doing well. I am a big believer in constant improvement, having hard time settling for good enough and seeing something broken I just have to fix it. I have great passion to develop games, myself, my team, my workplace and it’s processes to new heights.

I do not believe in cookie-cutter solutions. I first and foremost want to understand what truly are the key issues holding back the team/studio/game. And then I want to come up with solutions to those that fit the particular environment in question. 

Taking games, teams and studios from Good to Awesome!

That's my motto. I can't work miracles, but what I can do is make you, your game and your studio reach that next level, make you that little bit better that can make all the difference between success and failure.