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Exir Games CEO Sahand Malaei on the challenges facing small game studios

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Exir Games CEO Sahand Malaei on the challenges facing small game studios

Pocket Gamer Connects Nordics will soon be underway, bringing together developers, publishers and industry leaders to discuss the games industry.

Among the speakers is Sahand Malaei, CEO and game designer at Exir Games, a Finland-based indie studio that is focused on creating mixed reality games. Malaei will take part in the "Does the Best Game Win Anymore?" panel.

Previously CEO of Dropout Games, Malaei led the production of more than 60 hypercasual mobile games that were played by more than 70 million people worldwide.

PocketGamer.biz: Please give us a summary of what you’re speaking about and why it’s important.

Sahand Malaei: I'm taking part in a panel titled "Does the Best Game Win Anymore?" I spent seven years building a hypercasual mobile games studio in Iran, and working in hypercasual meant that marketing and finding the right audience for our games mattered just as much as, if not more than, making a great game.

Our studio, Dropout Games, produced mobile games that were played by tens of millions of people worldwide, but as the market became increasingly difficult for small studios, we made a risky bet: abandoning the model we knew well to build a new studio around mixed reality.

The new studio, Exir Games, went on to develop Banners & Bastions for Meta Quest while operating from Iran, where international sanctions, restricted access to services and payment infrastructure, and eventually two wars and their resulting internet blackouts made the already difficult job of running an indie studio considerably harder.



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