The publishing stage
After my involvement in Throne of Legends came to an end, I moved to the publishing side of SuperHippo, within the Production department. This was quite a different experience from my previous work as a Game Designer, because instead of focusing on developing a particular game, I was now responsible for evaluating projects submitted by external development studios that wanted to work with us. The company had an annual budget of approximately €35 million available for funding game development, and part of our business model involved finding studios with promising projects, financing their development, and eventually publishing those games on the Nutaku platform. If a game became successful, the revenue would be shared between the studio and our company, while the developer would remain responsible for keeping the product operational and maintaining its development. At that stage, we would only cover a smaller portion of the ongoing costs, usually around 30%.
My role was essentially to act as one of the gatekeepers for these investments, evaluating whether the proposed games made sense from both a product and business perspective. Developers would send us their prototypes, Game Design Documents, economy spreadsheets, menu flows, and other documentation, which I would review to understand how their games worked, how they intended to monetize them, and whether they had a realistic chance of becoming profitable on our platform. This involved looking beyond the initial concept and trying to understand the entire experience, from the core gameplay loop and progression systems to monetization opportunities, content requirements, and long-term sustainability. A game could have an interesting idea behind it and still be completely unsuitable for our audience or too expensive to develop relative to its potential revenue.
However, my responsibility wasn't simply to approve or reject projects. Before recommending that we pass on an opportunity, I was expected to explore whether the game could be adapted into something worth publishing. Sometimes this meant proposing relatively small adjustments to the progression, economy, or monetization systems, while other times it required reconsidering the entire scope of the project or partially, and occasionally completely, redesigning the game. There were situations where the original concept was interesting but the business model didn't make sense, or where the developers had built a gameplay experience that needed substantial changes to appeal to our audience. In those cases, I would work on identifying a more suitable direction and determining whether the necessary changes were realistic within the available budget. It was a particularly interesting exercise because I had to consider not only what could make a game better, but also whether making those improvements would justify the investment.
Another important part of the job involved creating and reviewing the documentation needed to turn these ideas into something developers could actually build. I worked extensively with game design documents, gameplay flows, interface structures, economy models, and progression systems, often having to translate relatively abstract design ideas into clear specifications. The examples above show some of the flowcharts I created to describe how different systems and interfaces were supposed to function. They might not be particularly exciting to look at, but they were useful for explaining the relationships between gameplay, progression, rewards, and monetization, especially when working with external teams that needed a clear understanding of what we expected from a product.
During this period, I also became considerably more comfortable working with Excel. While I had already used spreadsheets for game design, evaluating and redesigning economies across so many different products required a much more systematic approach. I needed to calculate currency exchange rates, item prices, reward distributions, progression requirements, and other variables that could significantly influence a game's economy. Rather than calculating everything manually, I started building more elaborate formulas and spreadsheets that allowed me to model different scenarios and adjust values more efficiently. It wasn't always glamorous work, but it was an essential part of understanding whether a game's economy could support its intended progression and monetization systems.
Work Sample 4 -Loot Box Reward Simulation
Another example is a formula I used to simulate loot box rewards based on different item probabilities, together with a formula for tracking how frequently particular rewards appeared.
Looking back, this was probably one of the periods when my understanding of game development expanded the most. Until then, I had mostly experienced the industry from the perspective of someone working on individual products, but publishing exposed me to the business decisions behind choosing which games should be developed in the first place. I learned to evaluate projects more critically, consider their commercial potential, and understand how development budgets, production constraints, player expectations, and monetization strategies influenced one another. I also had the opportunity to work with a much wider variety of game concepts than I would have encountered while developing a single title, which made the experience particularly valuable.
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