The most amazing thing about running a gaming studio

This weekend I was watching a podcast of our lead artist at Dragon Army – Michael Stanley – being interviewed by Wes Wilson on Twitch. If you aren’t aware of Twitch, its essentially a Youtube-esque website that is entirely dedicated to video games. While there is some content like this interview, over 99% of the videos on the site are of people playing video games. Yes, you read that right. People watching other people playing video games.

You might think its a super niche website that caters to a small group of people. Nope. Check this out: In 2013, Twitch had 45 million users that watched 12 billion minutes of video. It currently ranks 4th in overall peak Internet traffic behind Netflix, Google/Youtube, and Apple/iTunes. And right now Google is supposedly close to buying Twitch for a cool billion. Not bad for just a video game viewing website.

Needless to say, Stanley was tremendous on the podcast as he spoke about his love for gaming and his complete amazement that he gets to make video games for a living.

While Dragon Army has a lot of aspects that will make it the most challenging startup experience I’ve had to date – the marketplace is run by two organizations (Apple and Google), the competition is insane with thousands of games uploaded to the app stores daily, consumers want everything in the space to be free, etc. – I also have the distinct advantage of working with people who LOVE what they do.

I cannot emphasize that enough. When our team members aren’t making games, they’re playing games. And talking about games. And reading about games. How amazing is that?! It’s really the dream of every CEO to have people who are uber-passionate about their product/service, yet it rarely ever happens. In this case, its built right into the business model.

And when you work with people that love what they do, it makes every day at Dragon Army seem like a blast.

below: Stanley shaving his head in the office.