Let’s sail together!

We have always considered ourselves as being creative. We love art and technology, so working in the gaming business came as a natural progression in our lives.

In 2008 Ubisoft announced they would open a new studio in Craiova (ROU). In a local economy dominated by industrial and financial sectors, just imagine your friends and family’s reaction after you say that you want to do video games for a living.

However, we knew that this will definitely be the next best thing. And some very good years followed: working on some cool new platforms, on big projects while getting paid for something we really enjoyed doing… too good to be true, right? Pretty much, yeah! Do this for a couple of years though and you start feeling like something needs to change. The excitement of working on a AAA game disappeared after doing it a couple of times, and the day-to-day reality started to feel like riding a huge clumsy mammoth in a small city.

Cip and I (you’ll meet us later) worked together in the same studio and at that time we were looking towards the next step for both of us. The ideal next move would have been to go indie and start a new studio but our experiments went nowhere. We had the chance to work for a local software company where we met our future partner, Philip (you will get to know him soon). He managed to build a successful software business and we had lots of common interests, but entertainment industry wasn’t something that I knew we shared.

If you had ever asked me before about seeing ourselves starting a studio together, I would have said no chance.

“So you like video games, huh? How about building a gaming studio from scratch, is that something you might be interested in?”, we randomly said. He got hooked on this idea. At a second look it was a good sync, all three of us had some complementary skills and experiences plus we knew some ex-colleagues that could step in, all of that on top of an initial founding and we were ready to go.

All that being said, here is the most powerful lesson we’ve learnt so far:

“Always speak up your passion, magic may happen!”

As Simon Sinek once said, our passion and vision is only actionable if we share it. Without sharing it, it’s just a figment of our imagination and PVP Studio, from its blog to its product (more about this later — we know… shocker!) represents our way of doing it.

After a few discussions we knew this was something that would become a great journey and felt led in this direction. PVP Studio was founded at that moment on a solid foundation and on a powerful common passion for games.

This article is part of the ongoing series, “Our Ship It Journal”. Written by the team directly involved, the series looks at the full, uncut journey of creating an independent game studio.