From My First Days in Video Games to Today

It is summer of 1993, and I am at my first video game trade show, CES Chicago. Many of you reading this do not even know that CES Chicago existed. I am employee #2 at a new video game start up, and I am with Kelly Flock (RIP, employee #1 and an industry legend) at the show to find products. We are in a four wall booth on the show floor taking meetings with developers who have their games on EPROMs to demo for publishers.

The heavy hitters have spots in Nintendo and Sega's big booths. If you are lucky enough, Sega and Nintendo will let you publish three games per year on their platform. The publisher sources the game or builds it internally, pays for development, buys the cartridges from Nintendo or Sega, sells the games into the big retailers, likely paying for placement, and if the games do not sell they come right back to you. The publisher pays for all of the marketing. The PC market was not much different except there was no platform partner and a smaller installed base of hobbyists.

Fast forward to 2026, I am in my home office having started a new company, Plan A Games, with my founding partners Mike Lang, Huy Nguyen and Rob Hodgkinson. We raised money from an amazing partner, Fortress Investments, and additional capital from great co-investors. We don't have any game development resources. We have a small team of data engineers and data scientists in New Orleans, a business development exec in Madrid, a finance exec in the Bay Area, a marketing consultant, an Asia market focused consultant, and the founders who are active in the day to day operations. We focus on user acquisition funding for mobile free to play games in the market with KPIs demonstrating they can scale with access to user acquisition funding. That's it, just UA funding. What happened between 1993 and 2026 and how is UA funding even a thing? Why did the games business evolve in this way?

The big publishers had the money to pay for game development and marketing and had access to the retail shelf space. Things started to change fast with the iPhone and the Apple Store. The retail shelf space was now in everyone's pocket. Business models also dramatically changed. Chinese developers pivoted to a free to play model to combat PC game piracy. Play the game for free and buy items to advance in the game or personalize your experience. Very quickly mobile adopted the free to play model and the retail model eroded, giving way to digital distribution and changing the financial dynamics of the business.

The big publishers held on for dear life to their retail publishing model, but the tide shifted. The cash on the big publishers' balance sheets and access to retail shelf space were their tactical advantage and now it's irrelevant as developers have direct access to players on mobile devices and also PC and console. The big publishers' distinct advantage disappeared.

What replaced the cash that the big publishers poured into product development and marketing? Big game developers continued to invest in new games and marketing. New publishers emerged and succeeded with the new free to play model and the new market dynamics. Many mobile game developers turned to venture capital funding, which accelerated dramatically, to fund developers' products and allow developers to independently go to market. However, the tables turned again. With the app stores as the dominant storefront for mobile games and performance marketing, user acquisition costs now exceed game development costs. The VC model cannot keep up with this new paradigm. VCs want a 10x return on every dollar they invest. That's very likely not possible in this new paradigm. So, VC investment is not practical to cover the capital needs of mobile games that have the KPIs indicating they can scale and even if they did the cost of VC capital to fund UA is way too dilutive and expensive.

We have clearly entered a new area of opportunity for mobile game developers to independently build and publish amazing game experiences with smaller teams, new tools and technology, direct access to players, quick and immediate feedback from player communities and data analytics tools to measure performance, the list goes on. New funding structures are emerging to fill the funding gaps.

The Plan A Games team experienced these dynamics first hand in our previous roles at large publishers and most recently at Pixel United and Big Fish Games. We took our collective experience and developed a new model which aligns with these new market dynamics and also game developer goals. We are not funding game cohorts. We understand and consider the full lifecycle of the game and have created a flexible funding structure directly tied to how a game scales.

Plan A aligns our interests with our developer partners. The UA funding business is growing. Plan A is doing it differently from the others. We are not bankers, but game business professionals. We are looking for the right opportunities with game developer partners who value what we provide. If you want to learn more, visit us at planagames.com.