Operator-led consultancy for the games industry

You can hire anyone to advise you. Almost none of them have shipped a game.

Vivrato is the first video game industry focused consultancy. We are operators. People who have run studios, launched platforms, published games and made the hard calls, advising the people doing it now.

30 yearsOperator leadership
PlayStation · EA · CapcomWhere we come from
100Interviews in our AI research
Indie to AAAWho we work with

Why Vivrato

Games are not just products.

You can hire a strategy firm. They will build you a good model, run a clean process, and hand you a deck. What they cannot do is tell you what happens to a team in month fourteen of a slipping project, or which publisher actually pays on time, or why a great build still misses.

That is not analysis. That is having been there.

01

Operators run every engagement

Everyone on this team has carried a shipping title, a P&L or a studio. We give advice we have had to live with.

02

Creativity and sustainability

A great game and a viable business belong in the same plan. We refuse the premise that you have to pick one.

03

Relationships first

Decades of trust across studios, publishers and platforms. That network is why we can open a door rather than describe one.

04

Built on hope

Layoffs, cancellations, uncertainty. We started this because the people making games deserve better odds.

Who we work with

We have sat on every side of the table.

Indie through AAA, and the people who fund them. The advice changes depending on which chair you are in, so we start by working out which problem is actually yours.

Developers and co-dev

Leadership, production health, greenlight decisions, external team integration, and the pitch you take into a publisher meeting.

Publishers and platforms

Portfolio calls, launch execution, monetisation that respects players, developer relations, and partnerships that hold when a project moves.

IP and rights holders

You own something people love and want it to live in games. We map what the IP can carry, what it should not, and who is worth talking to.

Investors

Diligence from someone who can read a build and a burn chart. Venture, private equity, banks and independent investors.

What we do

Four places we make a measurable difference

Most engagements start in one of these and end up touching two. We scope to the problem, not to a retainer.

People and leadership

  • Empowering leaders and teams
  • Organisational design and collaborative culture
  • Succession planning and knowledge transfer

IP, growth and partnerships

  • IP and franchise strategy, licensing and portfolio roadmaps
  • Mergers, acquisitions and partnerships
  • New revenue streams and market expansion
  • Middleware and engine collaborations

Market positioning

  • Industry benchmarking and trends
  • Project-specific risk and cost-benefit
  • Long-term sustainability and scalability

Sustainability and negotiation

  • Smart contract and scope management
  • Business development and client success
  • Pitch development and financial oversight

Named engagements

Defined pieces of work with a defined output. Each one has a scope, a timeline and a price.

All engagements →

The adoption ladder

Six rungs. No judgement.

Every organisation we interview lands on one of six rungs. Refusing counts. So does rebuilding the whole pipeline around it. The ladder places you without telling you where you should be.

Find your rung
L0
Abstaining
L1
Exploring
L2
Piloting
L3
Operating
L4
Compounding
L5
Native

Bar heights illustrate the ladder, not the distribution. The real distribution publishes with the report.

Intelligence and strategic research

We do not guess. We ask.

Vivrato runs primary research across the industry. Confidential, one to one, senior. Structured interviews with the people who sign off on the decisions, aggregated into something you can act on.

Explore our research

Everyone has an opinion about AI in games. We went and asked the people actually making the decisions, on the condition that nobody's name is attached to it.

Adam Boyes, Founder, Vivrato

100

C-suite interviews

The Vivrato AI Adoption Index

  • Confidential interviews with C-suite and studio leadership
  • Indie, AA and AAA. North America and Europe. PC and console.
  • Forty-five structured questions, asked the same way every time
  • Adopters and refusers both in the data

The conversations we would be having anyway

We started a podcast for the same reason we started the consultancy. The most useful knowledge in this industry lives in people's heads and rarely makes it out. Gaming Decoded gets it on the record.

Who you actually work with

Operators you can trust

The person who pitches you is the person who does the work. Behind them sits an advisory bench we bring in when a problem needs them.

Meet everyone →
AB
Adam BoyesFounder and CEO. PlayStation, Iron Galaxy, Capcom, EA.
CB
Connie BrammeierOperations strategist. Two decades of development and global production.
DS
Don SechlerCo-founder and former CFO, Blumhouse Games. Ex PlayStation strategic finance.
DM
Douglas MorinFormer CEO, Devolver Digital. Board adviser, Raw Fury.
SL
Stefan LampinenWorldwide strategy at EA, Nokia, Microsoft and Warner Bros.
MW
Markus WindelenFormer Partner, Nordisk Games. Former COO, Gameforge.
JL
Jon LanderRan global product and publishing operations at Bethesda Softworks.
MS
Mark StanleyGlobal executive and strategic operator. Founder, Syndicate of Play.
TM
Tracey McGarriganEntrepreneur and commercial advisor. Running her own businesses since nineteen.
BG
Bruce GroveBoard advisor and fractional CTO, COO and CPO for scaling companies.
AR
Andrea ReneHost, Gaming Decoded. CEO, What's Good Games.
+
Our advisorsA standing bench of industry leaders we bring in when a problem needs them.

Tell us what is actually going on

Send us the real problem: the slipping project, the deal you are unsure about, the team that is not working. We will tell you honestly whether we can help.

contact@vivrato.com

Would rather talk? Book 30 minutes with Adam.

Send us a note

Four fields. A person reads it, not a queue.

We read every one of these ourselves.