Playdemic founders Paul Gouge and Alex Rigby recently announced ForthStar, their next mobile free-to-play game studio. Following the run-away, critical, and commercial success of Golf Clash and the studio’s subsequent sale to Electronic Arts for a record-breaking $1.4 billion, both are now entirely focused on building ForthStar. They are bringing together the best talent in the industry to build games with creativity, innovation, and great gameplay at heart.
While the reveal of their first game is more than a year away, with $10 million secured from Griffin Gaming Partners, the team has sufficient funds in place to support the development of their next hit. This enables the studio and leadership team to focus entirely on building a stellar team capable of bringing their multi-award winning, player-first development formula to the world’s biggest gaming platform.
Based in Manchester, Alex and Paul have been joined by many key figures from Playdemic who helped Golf Clash reach more than 150 million installs. Now, ForthStar is actively recruiting creative and technical talent as they look to build out their industry-leading team further.
With a focus on studio culture and nurturing creative talent, Gouge and ForthStar Co-Founder and Creative Director Alex Rigby have proven they can win in the highly competitive but deeply profitable mobile space. Since founding their first mobile studio, BattleMail, in 2001, Rigby and Gouge forged a formidable track record for studio success. Their debut enterprise was sold to (M)Forma in 2002 and was soon followed by the creation and sale of Rockpool Games to Eidos/Square Enix in 2007. More recently, the sale of their third studio, Playdemic, to Electronic Arts (after several years inside Warner Bros) set new records for a UK studio achieving an industry-breaking cash price of $1.4 billion.
The consistent thread in each studio is the leadership’s alignment to a strong belief in the pursuit of excellence and creative thinking, set amidst a supportive, inclusive, and inspirational culture that promotes collaboration, innovation, and professional growth. With a solid focus on people, ForthStar is one of the few to trial a four-day working week as part of its hybrid and flexible approach to working, while an anti-crunch ethos that focuses on output rather than input demonstrates the leadership’s commitment to forward-thinking business practices.
KEY QUOTES:
“Our mission is clear; to make great games that millions of people love to play, every day for years. It’s an objective we have achieved before, and one that we know we can meet again by building exceptional games that captivate millions of players and become essential daily entertainment.”
– ForthStar CEO and Co-Founder Paul Gouge
“We have been fortunate enough to lead and build studios populated by some of the most accomplished and creative talent in our industry. With the opening of ForthStar we are able to leverage all we’ve learnt in more than two decades of mobile gaming, establishing the strongest foundation for future innovation and success.”
– ForthStar co-founder and Creative Director Alex Rigby
