Minecraft made the combination of the old 8-bit art style and Lego-like open worlds fashionable. And Pixowl is exploiting the same opportunity with The Sandbox on mobile devices. As the company’s user base zooms past 10 million, the San Francisco company is contemplating how to turn that into 100 million users.
Randy Breen
That’s why Arthur Madrid, the chief executive of Pixowl, has enlisted a couple of industry veterans to join as advisors. Pixowl has recruited industry veterans Ed Fries, the cofounder of Xbox and former chief of Microsoft Game Studios, and Randy Breen, the former CEO of SGN, to give the company advice about growth and moving to new platforms. They join current advisors Eric Hautemont, the CEO of Days of Wonder, and Sunil Gundera, the former vice president of Disney Mobile.
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Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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