The Devil’s Advocate.

Making games since leaving school — forty years, across every platform from the Commodore 64 onward. Part of Rainbow Arts in the era of Turrican and The Great Giana Sisters, built the tank simulation Panzer Elite at his own studio, served as CEO of a publicly listed games company, and ran The Settlers Online, Ubisoft’s first successful free-to-play title.

For the past two decades an independent consultant, advising studios across Europe, Asia and the United States — usually in the role he prefers, and the one the book is written in: the Devil’s Advocate, hired to find the hole in the plan before the market finds it.

He speaks regularly at industry conferences, has spent more of his own money inside free-to-play games than he cares to see in print, and lives near Berlin.