In Conversation With... Jean-Marc Broyer

Hi Jean-Marc and thank you for taking the time to sit down with me and talk about the industry and your views and experiences! Let me get started with acknowledging that you have a rare "Triple Crown" of experience: Traditional Publishing (Ubisoft, EA), Big Tech Gaming (Amazon Games), and Venture Capital (Tencent). When you compare the production culture at Amazon Games to your time at EA, what was the biggest difference in how "success" was defined? Was it purely about the game, or about the ecosystem?

Jean-Marc Broyer: At EA, success was defined through the team and its craft. The focus was about building the strongest possible version of the game, pushing the design, and aligning around “what good looks like.” Quality, clarity of vision, and team execution were the core metrics.

At Amazon, success had a different centre of gravity. We had to demonstrate customer impact and business viability at every step. Each decision required clarity on what problem we were trying to solve, what data could back it up, and how the project fit within the Amazon ecosystem.

Both cultures optimize for different definitions for success, EA's definition is in creative excellence and team ambition. Amazon success definition is in high customer focus and business return, with the game positioned as just one part of a larger (Amazon) ecosystem. I found it very interesting to be part of both cultures for a while and learn things from different perspectives.

At Amazon Games, you served as Executive Producer. That title can mean anything from "Creative Lead" to "Business Manager." In a "Tech-First" environment like Amazon, how did you fight for the creative chaos required to make a good game when the organization is built on efficiency and predictability?

Jean-Marc Broyer: At Amazon, Executive Producers in my group were responsible for building the central organisation and sourcing several second-party games for a new hardware platform. In my role, that meant setting up the greenlight process, evaluating and onboarding external studios, hiring producers and the rest of the central support team, and managing milestone reviews across multiple projects in parallel.

The external developers led the creative side. They owned the pitch, the design direction, and the overall feel of the games we greenlit. Our role at Amazon was less about core creative and more about making sure the developers could actually deliver: keeping projects on track, unblocking or accelerating when needed, reducing risks, and pushing for higher production values for players. That required an organized operating approach, but it did not remove the creative chaos that is part of making games.

We had weekly calls with each studio that included deep creative discussions. Outside those sessions, we focused on the structure needed to keep everything moving. The model worked because the creative ownership stayed with the developers, and my job was to create the conditions for success and meet Amazon expectations around hardware showcase and clear business outcomes.

After decades in big organizations, the structure eventually limits what you can do. The work remains important, but the room to grow becomes narrow.

You have held senior leadership roles at the industry's heaviest hitters, Tencent, EA, Warner Bros., Amazon. Launching Breeyo Advisory signals a major shift. Why was now the right time to leave the safety of the "Big Corp" umbrella to operate as an independent advisor? What gap in the market are you filling that the giants couldn't address?

Jean-Marc Broyer: After decades in big organizations, the structure eventually limits what you can do. The work remains important, but the room to grow becomes narrow. Moving on becomes the next step when you want to expand your own impact.

I had already been thinking about this back when I reached senior leadership roles in independent studios. Once you are fully responsible for teams, products, and outcomes, you start asking yourself what the next level of contribution looks like. With experience across development, publishing, and investment, in several countries and cultures, the advisor role was the one place where I could help more than one studio at a time.

The state of the industry made the timing clear. Investors and publishers are stretched thin, and much of the work they used to handle internally - scouting, due diligence, product evaluations, portfolio support - has become a bottleneck. Studios are under pressure too. They need help organizing teams efficiently, building convincing pitches, de-risking and solidifying their productions, and finding the right partners, but they often cannot get that full support from the same people who fund them without creating tension.

That is the gap Breeyo fills. An advisor who understands the trinity of the industry, stepping into the space where developers genuinely need guidance but where publishers and investors cannot step in directly without creating friction, both before a deal is signed and after a studio enters a portfolio. Someone who brings clarity without politics, sits next to developers as an operator, and can challenge assumptions in a way that helps every side make better decisions.

Consultants often get a bad rap in gaming for delivering PowerPoint decks and leaving. Given your background in operations (running studios, managing automation), how does Breeyo differ? Are you doing "fractional C-Suite" work, or is this about preparing studios for acquisition/investment?

Jean-Marc Broyer: I am aware of the reputation consulting has in games or otherwise, and in many cases it is deserved. A lot of it stays as high level analysis, decks, and recommendations that never really meet reality on the ground.
Breeyo is built on the opposite assumption. The value is not slides, it is proximity. I work with teams where the work is happening: inside production, inside leadership discussions, inside decision moments. That comes from having actually run studios, shipped games, managed live operations, dealt with publishers, and worked with investors. I know how most games are made, where they break, and where theory stops being useful.

In practice, Breeyo sits somewhere between advisory and execution. Yes, I do take on fractional leadership roles when that is what a studio or a portfolio needs: strategic direction, production oversight, organizational clarity, or executive-level decision support. I also help studios prepare for publishing deals, funding rounds, or acquisitions, but not as a packaging exercise. The work starts much earlier: clarifying strategy, de-risking production, aligning teams, making sure what is being pitched can actually be delivered.

At the same time, I support publishers and investors with portfolio reviews, studio evaluations, due diligence, and post-investment support. The key difference is that I am independent. I can sit next to developers as an operator while still speaking the language of publishers and investors, without the power dynamics that usually get in the way.

So it is not about choosing between fractional C-suite work or deal preparation. It is about being a sherpa in the literal sense: someone who has walked the terrain before, stays with the team during the climb, and helps them make the right decisions at the moments that matter most.

You’ve worked at Amazon, where the runway is theoretically infinite, and now you advise studios via Breeyo that might have 18 months of cash left. What is the most dangerous habit a developer picks up from working at a big studio that they must unlearn immediately when they go independent?

Jean-Marc Broyer: First, I wish most studios had 18 months of runway. In reality, many have far less, which turns the work into rescue or turnaround situations rather than optimization.

That said, the most dangerous habit developers bring from big studios is the idea that financial responsibility lives somewhere else. In large organizations, budget ownership, risk, and consequences are distributed at best. When you go independent, mission zero is cash flow. Before creativity, design, or tech, your job is to make sure the company stays alive. Managing a studio is fundamentally different from leading a team inside one.

A close second is the “scale to solve problems” reflex. Big orgs can throw headcount, specialists, time, or parallel teams at an issue. Independent studios cannot (this might change with A.I. but it is not the focus here). That is why over-hiring and over-specializing too early is a common trap. Staffing for an ideal org chart instead of what the company can actually afford. Indie teams need flexible generalists, selective specialists, often temporary workers, and a clear plan B for what happens when revenue or funding slips.

The third (I know you only asked for one but I can’t help it, sorry) is misunderstanding accountability. In large organizations, failure is often absorbed. As an independent founder, it is not. You cannot “write it off”. If the game fails, if the money runs out, if the company doesn’t make it, there is no one else to blame.
This is also why publishers and investors sometimes overestimate how easily strong Creative Directors or Executive Producers translate into strong founders. There is overlap, sure, but it is not the same job. Good advisors can help, but in the end, the founder owns the decisions AND the outcomes.

In a nutshell: what I see the most is a studio that has not yet aligned audience, economics, and execution into a single, believable story.

You’ve sat on the other side of the table at Tencent and managed portfolios. Now you help studios fix their pitch. When a studio comes to you with a "sure-fire" hit, what is the first operational hole you usually find? Is it their UA budget assumptions or their production timeline?

Jean-Marc Broyer: I have been on both sides of the table for most of my career. I have pitched internally for greenlights, externally for publishing and funding, and I have reviewed thousands of decks across studios of all sizes. At this point, helping teams pitch better feels less like a service and more like a responsibility to give back what I have learned.

When a studio shows up with a pitch, the first issue I usually find is neither UA assumptions nor the production timeline (although it happens!). It is the lack of operational narrative. The deck does not clearly answer the fundamental questions to hold it together.

First: Audience. Most decks either do not articulate who the game is really for, or they do it without data, nor benchmarks.

Second: Finance. Minimal forecasts are often missing or disconnected from reality. Sometimes the ambition is too small, sometimes wildly unrealistic, but very often the numbers are not tied to a scope, a schedule, or go-to-market strategic choices.

Third: Flow. Even strong ideas are buried under decks that are too long, too detailed, poorly structured. There is no clear logic or flow to the presentation, which makes it hard for an investor or a publisher to follow the story, let alone believe in it. In practice, many decision-makers do not even have the time to get through the full deck material and it becomes overwhelming. Furthermore, a publishing deck is not the same structure as an investor deck so this is more work than most developers expect.

In a nutshell: what I see the most is a studio that has not yet aligned audience, economics, and execution into a single, believable story.

That is also why deck reviews are rarely just about the deck. Very quickly, you see who the founders are, how they think, where they are coming from, and what are their pain points. Reviewing a pitch is often the fastest way to build trust and open a deeper operational conversation with founders for me.

Every production hits a crisis point or the "Dip." You’ve navigated this on massive IPs at WB and original projects at Amazon. As an advisor, how do you help a studio head distinguish between a project that just needs a pivot and a project that needs to be killed?

Jean-Marc Broyer: Every project hits a dip, or multiple dips actually. The risk is treating all dips the same.

When I help a studio navigate that moment, I start by grounding the discussion in reality rather than emotion. By the time a project reaches a vertical slice, it should tell a coherent and believable story to an execution path the team can actually deliver. If this is still not aligned at that point, the risk of continuing usually outweighs the cost of stopping but it also depends on the studio situation and those decisions are not always made in a rational way for obvious emotional reasons.

Killing versus continuing is rarely a yes-or-no call in isolation. The real question is whether the team can generate new evidence, quickly, that changes the outlook. More time without a specific objective does not help. What helps is a short, focused window with explicit goals. If that proof does not materialize, the answer becomes clearer.

I am also cautious with the idea of “pivoting”. In practice, most games do not pivot into something else. They either get fixed, improved, clarified, or they continue to drift until they get killed or die on release. True pivots are rare and usually come from a genius breakthrough where the team discovers something bigger than the original game, or, a last resort move driven by desperation.

My role as an advisor is to remove ambiguity from that moment to help leadership make a decision based on evidence, timing, and consequences. Sometimes killing a game is the right move. The real mistake is dragging it out forever when everyone can see it is not coming together.

We are seeing senior talent leaving AAA to start small studios. But we are also seeing big tech (Netflix, etc.) hiring aggressively. How do you advise a mid-sized client to retain their Lead Engineer when Amazon or Riot comes knocking with a salary double what they can pay?

Jean-Marc Broyer: You cannot win a salary war with Amazon, Riot, or Netflix. So the first thing I tell mid-sized studios is to stop framing retention as a compensation problem. It is a positioning problem.

Big companies offer money, brand, scale. Independent and mid-sized studios offer something different: ownership, direct impact, creative influence, speed. The question is: Is the studio being explicit about what it stands for and who it is really for.

For some engineers, especially earlier in their career, big companies are a fantastic learning engine. I benefited enormously from time spent at Ubisoft, EA, and Amazon. If someone is at a stage where they want exposure, structure, and acceleration, leaving for a large organization might be the right move. Trying to retain that person at all costs will not succeed.

Where studios get into trouble is when they think culture is something that emerges on its own. It does not. Culture is a top-down initiative. Founders define what matters. If the values are real and lived daily, the right people will stay, even when higher salaries are available elsewhere.

My advice is : be honest, early. Make sure your lead engineer in question understands the trade-offs, objectively. For example, they will not get big-company compensation, but they will get influence, visibility, and a direct line between their work and the outcome. If that is not what they want right now, it is better to part ways cleanly than to pretend money is the only issue.

Retention is not about keeping everyone. It is about keeping the right people who actually belong in the environment you are building.

You spent time at Tencent’s Venture Lab, so you know exactly what the world’s biggest investor looks for. When you help a client prep for a pitch today, what is the one thing you tell them to delete from their deck immediately because you know it sets off alarm bells for investors?

Jean-Marc Broyer: I am careful with the idea of “deleting” things from a deck. Investors are not naïve, and trying to hide or dodge a red flag usually makes it worse. If something is a real risk, the answer is not to remove it, but to own it and frame it properly.

If anything, veterans on the investor or publisher side can smell bullshit from far away. Most serious firms have people in the room who have built and shipped games, run teams, and seen hundreds of decks if not more. You cannot fool them, and when they sense you are hiding something, the red flag often becomes a deal breaker.

What actually sets off alarm bells is not a weakness, it is a lack of self-awareness. Teams that present everything as solved, perfectly risk-free immediately lose credibility as there are always things you don’t know. When there is a concern the right approach is to surface it deliberately, explain why it exists, and show how it is being mitigated.

In practice, that means you need a clear risk and mitigation slide, or a short narrative that explains your potential Achilles’ heel and why it is manageable. Investors are more comfortable backing teams who understand their own constraints than teams who pretend they do not have any.

A strong pitch is not about removing red flags. It is about showing that you see them clearly and know how to deal with them.

My advice is: when appropriate for you, use exclusivity as leverage first. See if it creates competition with publishers or other platforms. Negotiate window, marketing commitments, and clear compensation. And in almost all cases, protect your IP ownership.

At Amazon, the game is often a driver for the ecosystem (Prime, Twitch, AWS). In 2025, do you advise independent studios to sign exclusivity deals with platforms for safety, or is "going wide" (multi-platform) the only way to build real IP value today?

Jean-Marc Broyer: It is not a binary Exclusive for safety vs go wide for IP value, it is really a trade off: cash and some certainty now versus reach and long-term value later. The right answer depends on the studio’s runway, the type/genre of the game, and what the platform is actually offering beyond money.

Today, the default is still to go wide if the IP has real upside and the team can execute. Reach matters so much: more storefronts, more community, more word of mouth, more long-tail. Exclusivity narrows your funnel, and in many cases it hurts your momentum after the exclusive window ends, especially for live games or anything that relies on cross-play and a durable community.

That said, I would not tell an independent studio to automatically turn down an exclusive offer. If the studio is short on runway, or the deal de-risks the project meaningfully, it can be the right move. But it has to be priced correctly. The platform needs to compensate for the opportunity cost of not being on other platforms during the exclusive window, and the terms need to match the studio ambition. If the original plan was Steam-only, your leverage is different than if you were already planning a true multi-platform launch.

My advice is: when appropriate for you, use exclusivity as leverage first. See if it creates competition with publishers or other platforms. Negotiate window, marketing commitments, and clear compensation. And in almost all cases, protect your IP ownership. If the deal buys safety but costs the IP, it is rarely worth it.
Going wide is the best path to build long-term IP value, when you can afford it. Exclusivity can be a smart tool when it materially de-risks the studio, is compensated properly, and does not take away the IP.

The industry has shed thousands in recent layoffs. As studios try to do "more with less," do you see the role of the Executive Producer evolving? Will AI tools replace the "schedule management" part of the job, forcing EPs to become more creative/business focused?

Jean-Marc Broyer: I want to acknowledge first that the Executive Producer (EP)role is not consistently defined across the industry. Depending on the company or region, it can mean a business-focused role similar to a film EP, a creative leadership role close to a Game Director, or a mix of both. That lack of clarity is a sign of our industry immaturity, but it is also evolving quickly.

In practice, EPs are rarely doing day-to-day schedule management. That work typically sits with Producers, Product Managers, or Project Managers. Tools, including AI, will absolutely improve how information flows: faster reporting, clearer visibility, better forecasting, and fewer blind spots. That is a net positive for everyone.

Where the EP role really sits is above that. EPs are responsible for alignment: creative ambition, production reality, and business viability, all moving in the same direction. That requires experience, and context. AI can support those decisions, but it cannot replace accountability for them, at least not for now!
Team sizes as we know them will change. Smaller studios will be able to reach a level of scope and ambition that used to be exclusive to hundreds of people “AAA scale” teams.

EPs will increasingly lead mixed teams, with humans, supported by AI expert agents. The EP job will be to orchestrate that mix well: use automation where it helps, lean on human capabilities when it really matters, while scaling output without losing clarity.

You’ve been in the trenches for over 20 years. Is there a specific "fire" you had to put out, maybe at Amazon or WB, that seemed catastrophic at the time but taught you a lesson you still use at Breeyo today?

Jean-Marc Broyer: There are many moments I could point to, but the ones that stayed with me were rarely single “explosions”. In retrospect, they were almost always slow fires that built up over time.

One situation I faced on a large project looked catastrophic on the surface: gates slipping, team losing confidence and quitting, pressure increasing, and no single cause or diagnosis anyone could point to. Everyone seemed to look at symptoms instead of addressing the “system”. At the time, it felt like everything was on the line and it was very tense.

What I learned from that experience is something I use constantly at Breeyo today. Most production crises are not caused by one issue. They come from small misalignments that stack up like unclear ownership, overoptimistic unchallenged assumptions, and pressure to push forward without a shared, believable story or plan.

The turnaround did not come from a heroic move from anyone. It came from stopping, simplifying, and enforcing clarity through new angles: what actually matters right now, what can realistically be delivered, and what needs to be cut or reframed, or reset. Once that clarity was restored, the team could execute again.
That is the core of what Breeyo does. When a studio calls in a “fire” situation, the first move is not to add urgency. It is to create clarity, challenge assumptions, and help leadership makes the right decisions in the right order. Fires are rarely solved by moving faster. They are solved by seeing clearly.

If you could change one standard industry practice regarding how games are funded or greenlit, something that drives you crazy as an advisor, what would you abolish tomorrow?

Jean-Marc Broyer: If I had a magic wand, I would get rid of the habit of pretending there is certainty in a hit-driven industry. Too many funding rounds and greenlight decisions are built on spreadsheets that imply predictability where none exists. That drives teams to over-promise on monetization, growth, or scale before the game has even proven it deserves to exist.

It also pushes teams to design games as copies of past winners, safer formats. Over time the industry becomes more “vanilla”, and it steers away from the very thing that makes hits in the first place: creativity and innovation.

What I would replace it with is a more systemic staged approach based on proof, not promises. Fund a small, focused phase to validate the core experience with a real player audience, then scale investment only when the game shows real pull.
That shift would reward teams for building something players want to enjoy and talk about. Hits have a higher chance to come from testing early and often with real players, and investing should go the same way: start small, then scale only when the game proves its interest.

About and contact to Zoran Roso

Zoran Roso stands as a highly influential veteran of the video game and entertainment industry, with a distinguished career spanning over 25 years in global publishing, marketing, and leadership roles. His professional journey includes serving in significant executive positions at some of the world's most recognizable gaming giants, including Rockstar Games/Take 2 Interactive, Activision Blizzard, and Sony PlayStation, where he was instrumental in the marketing and strategic positioning of flagship AAA franchises and brands. Most recently, he leveraged this extensive experience as the Global Publishing & Marketing Director at Tencent Games, a critical role focused on expanding the company's international reach and developing successful go-to-market strategies for its massive portfolio of internal and partner studios.

Now operating as the founder of ZR Consulting, Zoran continues to drive success in the industry by advising major global publishers and developers. His firm specializes in crafting winning strategies for international brand development, optimizing live service performance, and executing flawless launch plans across all major platforms, including console, PC, and mobile. An active figure in the global games community, his career is marked by a clear strategic vision and a successful track record in translating complex products into global commercial successes.

Contact details:
ZR Consulting
eMail: [email protected]
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zoran-roso/