Technical Leadership for Game Studios
Get your engineers back
to building the game.
Get your engineers back
to building the game.
Game studios are built to make games.
But as the team grows, the operational systems around the game start to matter more: builds, access, onboarding, cloud infrastructure, security, QA workflows, telemetry, vendor support, and production readiness.
When those systems are informal or under-owned, the symptoms show up quickly:
None of this means the studio is broken.
It means the technical operations around the studio need leadership.
Fragile builds, slow pipelines, unreliable CI/CD, unclear ownership, and milestone build heroics.
Onboarding, offboarding, SSO/MFA, devices, SaaS ownership, contractor access, and support workflows.
Security questionnaires, access reviews, source control permissions, cloud permissions, incident response, and practical security controls.
Cloud cost visibility, environment ownership, infrastructure drift, monitoring, alerting, backup/recovery, and operational guardrails.
QA triage, regression risk, readiness criteria, vendor alignment, quality signals, and go/no-go confidence.
Decision-grade metrics for playtests, demos, crashes, QA trends, player feedback, production decisions, and launch readiness.
Studio Foundations is best suited for studios that have real funding, real milestones, and real operational drag.
Typical fit:
This is not gameplay leadership.
This is not creative direction.
This is the technical operating layer around the game.
I map the operational risks across builds, DevOps, IT, security, cloud, QA, data, and milestone readiness.
We separate urgent issues from structural issues and identify what actually needs attention in the next 30, 60, and 90 days.
I help clarify ownership, reduce operational drag, create practical operating cadence, and protect senior technical leaders from recurring non-game operational distractions.
The goal is not process theater.
The goal is better execution.
Studio Foundations is led by Ben Cole, a fractional technical operations leader who has built and scaled DevOps, IT, security, cloud, QA, data, platform, and shared-services functions across game studios, entertainment products, regulated SaaS, and large-scale technology environments.
Relevant experience includes:
Studio Foundations originally began with build systems for Unreal and Unity studios. That work exposed the broader problem: broken builds are often only one symptom of underbuilt technical operations.
Today, Studio Foundations focuses on the bigger issue: helping funded game studios reduce operational risk around the game so the team can execute with more confidence.
If your studio is feeling operational friction, you cannot quite name, or your senior technical leaders are carrying too much non-game operational work, book a 30-minute review.
We will look at where technical operations may be creating friction and risk impacting your runway, resources, productivity, milestones, and stakeholder confidence.
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