£5 App - The grown-from-garage EuroGamer
By Ian Ozsvald • Feb 16th, 2008 • Category: Business, EventsLast Tuesday Rupert of EuroGamer gave a great talk on how he and his brother built one of Europe’s largest gaming news sites from their parent’s garage.
The story began aged 14 when he and his brother built a simple CMS to publish their game reviews. The site grew more popular and so did their back-end tech. Years later they signed deals to license out the technology to the likes of Sony which provided early income, along with running some large Euro-wide LAN-party events.
Their road to growth was a bit bumpy (isn’t it always?) and it wasn’t obvious that EuroGamer would be their destination. Along the way their on-the-side news site became well-renowned for having unbiased reviews and advertisers started to approach them.
From there the story is history - an overnight success just 10 years in the making. Now they have a large office and a staff of 20 based in the centre of Brighton.
John and I were very glad to have Rupert speak - it was fab to hear a story of success from Brighton’s strong gaming scene, especially since gaming companies are mostly disconnected from our usual audience of web-based companies. We hope to encourage a few more non-web companies to present at the £5 App as the year progresses.
Ian Ozsvald is Co-founder of ShowMeDo.com, £5 App monthly meets, OpenCoffeeSussex fortnightly-meets, general pusher of the idea: Brighton-is-great-and-everyone-in-tech-should-work-here.
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[…] built the ‘overnight success’ Eurogamer in ‘just 10 years’ I’ve written the event up at Rosie’s […]
Yeah, thanks for the good talk, Rupert.
Ian, interesting point about Brighton gaming companies being disconnected from “the rest of us”. I’ve been having a hard time connecting to games people (well, except for some of the EG people who I’ve known for a while, and some German friends over at NCSoft), and I was starting to wonder where everybody was hiding.
Brighton doesn’t really seem to have a lot of (visible) gaming activity. Would be nice to see that changed…
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One of things that I’m working on is trying to get the games scene more connected with the rest of us. It may take some time and encouragement. Have spoken to Jez from NCSoft who was very kind to share some info with me.
Am always keen to talk to people, so please come forward to see how Project Brighton can help!