Why I left the games business for the enterprise cloud

I recently decided to redirect my career to the enterprise cloud after many years in the game business. Games are fun, but the business of games sucks. I reflect on 18 years in the games business and share my perspective where its going and why I decided to focus my career in a new direction.

I got into the games business in 1996 when I founded B2B content distribution network Gigex. We discovered an opportunity in the growing PC game business and were the first company to build a vertical Software-as-a-Service CDN service to distribute game demo downloads as a marketing tool. Over the next 10 years, we launched over 275 PC game demos, console trailers, and marketing campaigns for the top game publishers, providing them aggregated user data from all over the Web that they valued as prerelease demand forecast. The business grew, and we pivoted in 2001 and became GameDaily.com, an ad-supported content business with downloads as part of it. Many people remember the daily B2B GameDaily newsletter arriving in their inbox and the GameDaily consumer review site that pioneered focus on the mainstream gamer. We published a family game guide written by moms for moms. TimeWarner AOL acquired the company in 2006, and I left the end of 2007. The big lesson from the Gigex and GameDaily years was the data we collected was the key to our value to our publisher and advertiser clients.