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Long Term Game: How To Build A Video Games Company
In Long Term Game, Joakim Achrén, former co-founder of Next Games, draws on years of experience in gaming startups to provide clear and honest guidance on how to found and build a thriving games company. Building a games company is usually thought by trial and error. But in the real world, this isn’t an effective way. It causes lots of misery and needless pain for entrepreneurs, whom all go through the same mistakes. They all are suffering from failures that are so common for gaming startups. This book was created, so that gaming entrepreneurs would have a resource, a guiding manual for finding clarity in their quest to build a games company. The author of this book, Joakim Achrén is the Founder and CEO of Elite Game Developers, a Helsinki, Finland, based company that helps gaming entrepreneurs in starting their first games company. Joakim is an entrepreneur, with fifteen years of experience in founding and running two venture-backed gaming startups, including Next Games, the company behind The Walking No Man’s Land and The Walking Our World mobile games. Joakim has gone through the venture capital fundraising process several times and has raised over $50 million in venture funding over his 15-year career as an entrepreneur. THIS BOOK IS INTENDED FOR people who are interested in founding and building a games company. The book covers aspects of putting together the idea for the company, the founding team, raising capital, validating your assumptions, and details on everything that can go wrong in the games business.
185 pages, Paperback
Published March 14, 2020
About the author
Joakim Achrén
5 books22 followersJoakim Achrén is a Finnish entrepreneur with 30 years of founding companies and 6 years of investing in startups. He has built companies in gaming, technology, and media, including co-founding a game studio that was acquired by Netflix.
After years of early-morning insomnia triggered by the stress of building and investing in companies, Joakim spent several years researching sleep science and testing strategies on himself. He interviewed dozens of founders about their sleep struggles, studied peer-reviewed research, and developed practical tools for the unique challenges entrepreneurs face.
His book Sleep Again: Finding Rest in a World Built on Urgency (2026) is a practical sleep guide written specifically for entrepreneurs and startup founders. It covers sleep science, lifestyle habits, mental strategies, and a hands-on sleep toolkit, backed by 87 endnotes referencing peer-reviewed studies.
His first book, The Long-Term Game: How to Build a Company (2020), is a guide for entrepreneurs on sustainable company building.
Joakim writes about entrepreneurship, sleep, and productivity on Substack, where he has built a readership of over 10,000 subscribers.
After years of early-morning insomnia triggered by the stress of building and investing in companies, Joakim spent several years researching sleep science and testing strategies on himself. He interviewed dozens of founders about their sleep struggles, studied peer-reviewed research, and developed practical tools for the unique challenges entrepreneurs face.
His book Sleep Again: Finding Rest in a World Built on Urgency (2026) is a practical sleep guide written specifically for entrepreneurs and startup founders. It covers sleep science, lifestyle habits, mental strategies, and a hands-on sleep toolkit, backed by 87 endnotes referencing peer-reviewed studies.
His first book, The Long-Term Game: How to Build a Company (2020), is a guide for entrepreneurs on sustainable company building.
Joakim writes about entrepreneurship, sleep, and productivity on Substack, where he has built a readership of over 10,000 subscribers.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
April 20, 2026
This book is a mix. A lot of the advice (particularly on monetization, metrics, and validation) is mobile-centric. Online resources no longer work. What’s left is worth skimming through. There are decent insights, with some good quotes from well-chosen sources.
It starts with a very general mindset section that leads into obvious facts about games and platforms, such as “The successful mobile game is easy to just pick up and play.”
Following this, you get suggestions that only apply to established studios: “Niantic Labs build Pokemon Go by licensing the Pokemon IP from the Pokemon Company. This resulted in one of the biggest success stories in mobile games.”
Mercifully, the book is short and, if you stick with it, you’ll eventually find valuable takeaways: “Founders should always focus on hiring upwards, meaning that they look for people who are more experienced than they are, in order to add more years of experience to the team. Founders shouldn't be afraid that more experienced people will end up "taking your job". After all, the founders are the people who built the company in the first place, and any smart individual will want to work together with the founders to build an even stronger company and culture.”
At one point, you are directed to “elitegamedevelopers.com/pmatrix” to see a prioritization matrix diagram. That URL no longer exists. Without it, the subsequent description is difficult to follow. The same applies to a URL for an example survey later on. (I tried to reach out to the author yesterday via Twitter, but didn’t hear back yet.)
Still, it’s worth reading (or a quick skim) for the one or two points you’ll take away. There’s a section on values and mission statements that is on the money - you gotta know why you are doing this thing, if you want others to join you on the ride. The most thorough section covers investment rounds; I suspect these days investing is the author’s main occupation.
There are useful quotes from other sources. And I liked the section on building a team.
Apart from that, I’m struggling to see what the many five-star reviewers on Amazon saw. I’d have given it four if the online resources still worked. There are better (certainly, more comprehensive) books that cover this ground.
You’re probably best suited to this book if you’re right at the start of your gamedev journey, you’re focused on mobile, and hoping to maybe start your own studio someday.
It starts with a very general mindset section that leads into obvious facts about games and platforms, such as “The successful mobile game is easy to just pick up and play.”
Following this, you get suggestions that only apply to established studios: “Niantic Labs build Pokemon Go by licensing the Pokemon IP from the Pokemon Company. This resulted in one of the biggest success stories in mobile games.”
Mercifully, the book is short and, if you stick with it, you’ll eventually find valuable takeaways: “Founders should always focus on hiring upwards, meaning that they look for people who are more experienced than they are, in order to add more years of experience to the team. Founders shouldn't be afraid that more experienced people will end up "taking your job". After all, the founders are the people who built the company in the first place, and any smart individual will want to work together with the founders to build an even stronger company and culture.”
At one point, you are directed to “elitegamedevelopers.com/pmatrix” to see a prioritization matrix diagram. That URL no longer exists. Without it, the subsequent description is difficult to follow. The same applies to a URL for an example survey later on. (I tried to reach out to the author yesterday via Twitter, but didn’t hear back yet.)
Still, it’s worth reading (or a quick skim) for the one or two points you’ll take away. There’s a section on values and mission statements that is on the money - you gotta know why you are doing this thing, if you want others to join you on the ride. The most thorough section covers investment rounds; I suspect these days investing is the author’s main occupation.
There are useful quotes from other sources. And I liked the section on building a team.
Apart from that, I’m struggling to see what the many five-star reviewers on Amazon saw. I’d have given it four if the online resources still worked. There are better (certainly, more comprehensive) books that cover this ground.
You’re probably best suited to this book if you’re right at the start of your gamedev journey, you’re focused on mobile, and hoping to maybe start your own studio someday.
Displaying 1 of 1 review