"The discipline of how decisions actually get made under pressure is still treated as a soft skill"

• Gameloft Bacelona's Raúl Orrego will speak at PGC Barcelona, which will assemble 1,000+ attendees over two days.
• Orrego discusses decision rigor and the process that goes into making the right ones.

Pocket Gamer Connects returns to Barcelona for the second year running on June 15th and 16th following a stellar debut event last year. 

We’ll assemble 1,000+ games industry professionals to discuss, exchange and connect on all things mobile, PC, console, AI and HTML5. Companies set to join the show include Zynga, Scopely, Gameloft, Rovio, Tetris, FunPlus, Digital Legends and many more.

One of the speakers set to join the conference is the general manager and executive producer of sphalt Legends at Gameloft Barcelona, Raúl Orrego, who leads a 200+ person team across mobile, PC and console.

Over 15 years he has run game operations at Gameloft and Garena, with earlier corporate finance and project management experience at Grupo Santander. He mentors indie studios through GameBCN and has taught management and economics across multiple universities and professional programmes.

Orrego will be hosting a session titled 'Time To Resolve', in which he'll share a framework for making high quality decisions under pressure. 

We caught up with Orrego ahead of the show to discuss game production, decision rigor and why decisions are not made in moments of clarity, but by people that have done the homework.

PocketGamer.biz: What is your biggest aspiration/goal in mobile gaming?

Raúl Orrego: Beyond the day to day of running Asphalt, my real ambition is helping the games industry build longer-lasting franchises through better decision-making.

The next decade will reward studios that can decide rigorously across economics, engineering, psychology and biology in seconds when needed and in days when warranted.

That is what my talk at PGC is about, and it is the work I want to keep building on for the rest of my career.

What developments do you think have been undervalued by the mobile games industry?

Decision rigor itself. Our industry has gotten very good at building tools, scaling teams and running experiments, but the discipline of how decisions actually get made under pressure, with the right balance of evidence and conviction, is still treated as a soft skill.

It is not. It is the multiplier that makes every other investment compound.

What key trend should we be paying attention to in the next 12 months?

The convergence of mobile-quality live operations with PC and console premium production. The next wave of breakout games will not be platform-defined. They will be live service quality experiences shipped on whatever screen the player is on.

Studios that learned to operate at mobile cadence and combine it with PC and console depth will have an unfair advantage.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received that you can pass on to others?

Pay the price the work demands. A mentor told me early in my career that great decisions are not made in moments of clarity, they are made by people who have done the homework long before the moment arrives. There is no shortcut.

Can people get in touch with you at the event? What sort of people would you like to connect with?

Yes, please reach out. I would love to connect with three groups in particular. Senior operators and founders building games on PC, mobile and/or console who are thinking about live operations and how to make them work without losing the soul of the game.

Investors and publishers backing original IP at the double-A scale. And anyone working on decision quality, organisational design, or how to scale a studio without losing the conviction that made it worth starting. The best place is LinkedIn and I will be at the event throughout.