Founded just over two years ago as one of the first Portuguese companies to ever venture into the gaming industry, GameInvest has only 40 employees, yet we will produce 10 new and innovative multi-platform games each year for the mainstream pop audience. 

I’m often asked how we were able to establish ourselves as a startup developer in a country that, until recently, had no presence in the games industry. 

In 2004, when the first Portuguese companies began to show an interest in mobile and PC gaming, I had just completed a white paper entitled “Portugal 2012”, which addressed the need for the Portuguese government to stimulate production in more creative industries.  After producing several games and animations and founding the Portuguese Game Developers Association (APROJE) in 2005, I realized that the country’s foray into the games industry would be short-lived unless we obtained some mechanisms for growth.

To that end, GameInvest was founded in 2006 with the intention of developing, publishing, and investing in new games for international markets.  Since then, both the Portuguese government and the venture capitalist community have taken an interest in our operation.  So far we’ve secured over €3MM in private investment funding and have been working with investors to secure financial backing for future startup opportunities. 

Additionally, we’ve been reaching out to both local and national governments to help us establish educational programs in game design and development in order to garner future support for the Portuguese gaming industry. 

While GameInvest and most of its partner companies are based in Portugal, we don’t consider ourselves exclusively Portuguese, or even exclusively European.  We have always aspired to be a worldwide company, and we’re intent on proving that Portugal can be the next great gaming hub.

Our company is based on the principal that games, like music and movies, should be accessible to people of all ages and tastes. I call this category of entertainment Pop Games.

Pop Games incorporate five principles: fun, innovation, memorable and commercial-friendly, high-quality and accessibility. We set out to demonstrate that just because a game is not “hardcore” it does not mean that it lacks in immersion and depth, and we hope to bring memorable experiences to a wide audience.

The success of this “Pop audience” phenomenon reaches beyond the gaming industry—the most successful cinema, TV, and music ventures don’t attract the mainstream audience by requiring complex or “hardcore” understanding of the medium.  People just enjoy them.  When we first developed our marketing strategy, we realized that millions of people consume media in this way, so we made it our mission to provide commercial-friendly entertainment for mainstream – the Pop market.

Appealing to the Pop market has been lucrative for us in several ways.  First, targeting a mainstream demographic has enabled us to reach people on a grander scale and allowed us to really focus establishing a presence in the industry over the past two years. Additionally, our Pop games strategy lets us be smart about how we’re funding our casual titles.  We’re not investing millions on one “hardcore” title per several years’ game production; instead, we use the same money to produce an average of 10 new “pop” games per year that are equally, if not more so, compelling to a mainstream audience than a hardcore title.

Once GI’s marketing strategy was established, we also prepared a different way to implement our business model, rather than a traditional “developer to publisher to distributor” system.

In the near future I hope to talk here about our studio strategy and our plans for the future.