A CHALLENGING JOURNEY
Tony Gillham, CEO at Blue Dot Games, shares his thoughts on founding a games company in the current industry climate
F
irst, some background. I am the CEO and a co-founder of Blue Dot Games, developers of the title ’83, an alt-history Cold War multiplayer shooter, which is a ‘spiritual successor’
to the successful Rising Storm and Red Orchestra titles published by Tripwire Interactive. I got my start in the industry by working on Darkest Hour, a mod
of Tripwire’s 2006 title, Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45. I had actually lived In Russia in Stalingrad (or Volgograd as it came to be known) and so had a huge interest in the subject material, and I discovered that I had some aptitude for forming and organising teams of modders. The big break for me came when we started working on Rising
Storm, originally intended to be a mod or DLC of Red Orchestra 2. We had a team of about 20 developers at any time throughout the project, all working on a back end deal basis. Rising Storm came out in 2013 and did pretty well, being ‘folded into’ the content of RO2. The royalties the team received from that release were used to
form Antimatter Games, and fairly soon after that, development of Rising Storm 2 commenced. I left AMG shortly after work started on that. Then, AMG started work on its next title, 83. They hit financial difficulties after Tripwire severed ties with co-developers and external studios working on the Rising Storm franchise. At this point Enad Global 7 bought AMG and funded continuing
development of 83. AMG also started development on an EG7 IP, the IGI franchise. So development was split between 83 and IGI:Origins, the rationale being that, as both were Cold War based shooters, the dev costs would be lower. Whether or not this was true, things changed with the bursting of
28 | MCV/DEVELOP August/September 2025
the bubble of COVID-era investment in the games industry. AMG was one of the first studios to be shut down in 2023. A lot of the staff migrated to Behaviour Interactive, forming their UK South division. But several key staff remained available, including AMG’s Senior IT manager (and co-founder of Blue Dot Games), Chris Rickard, and the Lead Designer of ’83, Sturt Jeffery, with whom I’d worked since the Darkest Hour days. EG7 had written off the 83 IP, but we were determined not to
let it die, so Chris and I approached them and asked for a license arrangement to access the IP, the huge amount of content developed, and the social channels that existed for 83. We used these as a platform to launch Blue Dot Games.
BEING A STARTUP WHEN THE SKY IS FALLING IN On paper Blue Dot Games had a solid offer for investors but, in 2023 and most of 2024, it was almost impossible to attract investment. The two usual sources of funding: VC firms and publishers were, for different reasons, not interested in picking up 83 and our budding team. The VCs were generally not interested as we were unable, with a
straight face, to promise the kind of 20X growth that moistens their collective gussets. We know our market (realistic PC based military shooter fans) very well; it offers solid and stable expectations of revenue but nothing earth-shattering in terms of company valuation increase. Strategically, we did not want to be tied to expectations of exponential growth, just to provide VCs with a good exit point at an arbitrary date in the future. There was also a ‘vibe’ going around VCs back then that ‘shooters’ were an oversaturated genre.
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