Alexander Fernandez

YOLO. There is no moat. Volatility is vitality. Live and love the game.

The video games industry today is like flying a plane in constant turbulence. Those 20 minutes of smooth flight are a godsend, while the rest of the time is a masterclass in grace under pressure. 25 years flying and it’s still fun. 🤩

The industry is effectively rolling dice at tables with the same jackpot. The only difference is the cost per roll. In the West, that cost can be up to 3× higher than in the Global South. When the jackpot is the same, spending three times as much for a roll of the dice doesn’t make economic sense unless you’re materially improving your odds. Even the most optimistic person has to recognize that the math is broken. Improving those odds requires a strong core team, partners in the Global South, and AI-enabled global orchestration. This isn’t simply about reducing production costs. It’s about improving the relationship between capital deployed, execution capability, and the probability of commercial success. Even then, success isn’t guaranteed. But better decisions, greater efficiency, and more effective execution can shift the odds in your favor.

Probably nothing. 🤓

AI and finance. AI and video games. AI and business. AI-enabled entrepreneurship. What a time to be alive.

Time, money, tech, business all compressing at once. Entrepreneurship in this age is exhilarating.

There is an easier version of what we do. Give the client a list. Point them at good people. Let them work out the contracts, the timelines, and the handoffs between five parties who have never worked together. It is a real business and I understand why it exists. We went the other way. One contract. One point of contact. If something breaks between two disciplines in two time zones, that is ours to solve, not something the client finds out about in a status meeting. It made the work harder. We cannot take every project that comes to us, and when a milestone slips there is nobody else to point at. But a client running a production is already holding enough. They should not also be the one assembling the thing from parts. That was the whole decision. #CoDevelopment #ExternalDevelopment #GameProduction

Every master carpenter eventually starts making their own tools. Not because the ones they can buy are bad. Because after enough years you know something about your own hands that no manufacturer could know. That is the least glamorous explanation for why we built our own production system, and it is the true one. We did not set out to make software. We set out to stop repeating ourselves. After a few hundred productions you start noticing that the same problems arrive in the same order, that the warning signs before a project drifts are almost always identical, and that none of it survives in anyone's memory past a quarter. So you write it down. Then you write it down in a way the next project can use. Then one day you look up and you have built a thing. Twenty-five years in, I think this is just what craft does when you stay long enough. Knowledge compounds, and at some point it wants a shape. The tools are not the achievement. They are the residue of having paid attention. #GameProduction #GameDev #CoDevelopment

Building while flying while leading and selling. AI doesn’t just compress time; it unlocks super execution capabilities.

Tokyo Game Show turns thirty this year.   I keep thinking about what that number actually means.   We have been doing business in Japan since 2013, starting with Capcom on Street Fighter V, then Square Enix on Final Fantasy XV, and now our latest project, MARVEL Tōkon: Fighting Souls, with Arc System Works and PlayStation.   Working alongside those teams has reinforced something we have seen time and time again in Japan: a complete dedication to craft. You cannot fake that.   There is no shortcut into it. No budget that buys it. And no way to hit fast forward on the time it takes to build it. Twenty-five years in, the teams I admire most are the ones that have stayed patiently dedicated to their craft for a very long time. The results speak for themselves. It is one of the reasons we keep going back to Japan.   Thirty years of TGS, and the reason to go has not really changed: to be around people who keep showing up, year after year, dedicated to getting better at what they do. #TokyoGameShow #GameDev #CoDevelopment

Physics is amazing when applied to business.

Great to see this. Co-dev, external development, game development- it’s all converging into what we simply call making games. The differentiator is no longer just technical ability. It’s the combination of capability, communication, and systems that consistently turn effort into great games. #gamedev #indiegames #codev #xds

Focus building. Focus selling. Focus delivering. It's really focus all the time. The hard part is being consistent when it's good, bad, and in between.