Paul Gouge

An Economics graduate, Paul was an investment banker before co-founding his first games company, BattleMail, in 1999. At its peak BattleMail had 1m active players, was pre-installed on 17m Siemens Mobile Phones and all Virgin Atlantic aircraft.  After the sale of BattleMail to (M)Forma,  Paul went on to co-found Rockpool Games and over the next 5 years, with Paul as CEO, Rockpool grew to be one of Europe’s leading mobile game developers.

With a team of 80 it created titles for the likes of Sega, THQ, Codemasters and Eidos, working on Top 10 properties such as Sonic the Hedgehog, Super Monkey Ball, WWE, Tomb Raider and SpongeBob SquarePants.  Rockpool was acquired by Eidos/Square Enix in 2007 with Paul heading up Eidos Play, Eidos’ Casual division until February 2009. In 2010, Paul co-founded Playdemic as a free-to-play mobile games studio, launching its first title, Gourmet Ranch, in July 2010. Playdemic has enjoyed great success with its three lead franchises with each achieving over 1m DAU and significant monetisation. Playdemic’s latest hit, Golf Clash is currently one of the Top 30 Grossing mobile games in the world. Playdemic was acquired by Warner Bros in December 2016.

Paul remains CEO of Playdemic but has also invested in a number of other games and technology businesses including Ironstone Partners (acquired by Eidos/Square Enix), Ideas Pad (acquired by Playdemic) and Appatyze (acquired by Teddy Sagi’s private office).