Anton Gauffin: Big, Bigger, Huuuge

Interview with Anton Gauffin, CEO of Huuuge Games

Huuuge Games chose Berlin for its thriving startup scene and exceptional creative and technical talent. Though still growing its local presence, the company is impressed by the city’s evolving game industry and strong support ecosystem.

What defines Huuuge Games is very much a mission. The Huuuge mission is to empower billions of people to play together. Such an ambitious mission keeps us thinking big. By extension, Huuuge is not focusing on any specific genre or any specific game; to connect billions we must think bigger. For us, that’s what it means to be Huuuge. The focus for our Berlin studio is to build “moonshot” products; potentially transformative, enormously ambitious projects beginning with a new social platform for mobile games. This is the kind of work that is made possible by the immensely talented people in the Berlin studio.

Berlin and I have a long history. I have been living in Berlin for quite some time. A story for another interview, perhaps. We decided to open a studio in Berlin because of the people. Berlin’s start-up scene has been growing considerably and making a name for itself in recent years; an unsurprising trend given the quality and quantity of exceptional creative and technical talent here, and Berlin’s increasingly entrepreneurship-friendly business infrastructure.

As a company, Huuuge is truly global, which means much of my time is spent in our various locations and travelling between them. By extension, my role hasn’t allowed me to be networking in the Berlin ecosystem to the degree I’d like, but we continue to be impressed with the quality of the people. Something I have noticed: in Berlin there is a kind of game education process going as both businesses, individuals and state officials come to terms with the scale and opportunity of the games industry. We see this education bearing fruit in the job applications we receive, the general interest in the Berlin startup ecosystem, and the support schemes offered by German trade bodies. It has been overwhelmingly positive. We wouldn’t be here if things weren’t great.

We love hyper casual games. We have been building hyper casual games ourselves. Generally speaking, our strategy is currently favoring a publishing approach as it allows Huuuge to effectively leverage its resources, infrastructure and expertise to enable amazing teams to an unprecedented extent. As a result, we have been building our own publishing offering and we are partnering with developers and game creators from around Europe and further afield. We are very excited that there are so many talented hyper casual game developers in Berlin; our studio in the city keeps us close to the action.

Where to start… we already spoke about our mission to empower billions of people to play together. It will take time to get there and the breadth of the goal requires us to expand in many directions simultaneously. You will certainly see more casual games coming from us, more hyper casual and social games, too. Huuuge is already 500 people strong, and we’ll continue to grow as we build our next awesome games. For our Berlin studio specifically, there is always room for talented game designers, developers, artists and analysts at Huuuge. We look forward to doing amazing things in the Berlin studio; watch this space!

Join us: huuugegames.com/careers