Join us in welcoming Craig to our team and find out what he plans for our future.
We’re thrilled to announce that Craig Fletcher – founder of Multiplay and entrepreneur – has joined our team as Chief Operating Officer. Craig was actually our first investor and has worked with us for years, but he’s now stepping up and taking a more hands-on role to help us grow our business even further.
Earlier this week, we sat down with Craig so he could tell us a bit about what he’s planning for the future and give us a bit of background about himself.
“Originally, I started out running LAN parties in the mid 90s, while I was at school. From that, I founded Multiplay, which started as large-scale LAN event festivals. I was going to become a doctor, but actually quit my final year of university to go run Multiplay full time.
“Then, in 2002, we saw that people needed good clan servers – that’s what they used to be called back then. So I launched the Multiplay online division. I think at one point, we had 30,000 servers online for everything from Teamspeak to Counter Strike to Medal of Honour. You name it.
“After I left all that behind, I started investing in projects that excite me.”
“I like to help. I’m the least non of non-exec people. I can’t help but get my hands dirty, because I like to affect change and make a difference. And I like to build teams and lead people. So I went into investment and, you know, started helping. Particularly companies that I thought I could help grow.
“And Gameye was one of my first investments. In fact, I was Gameye’s first investment.”
“It’s just as hard to take a company from 25 to 50 people as it is to start a company up. It goes from being a phone call every so often to needing days of actual help setting up new systems and processes. There’s a phrase: “What got you here, won’t get you there.”
“Things have to change. How you communicate, how you work together, how you organise your teams. It all suddenly stops working when you get bigger, so you have to find new ways of doing it.
“I’ve been through that process before. So I can hopefully help navigate Gameye through this growth phase we’re going through. All those growing pains as we scale up.”
“There’s a huge opportunity for us to dramatically change the landscape of cloud computing. Many companies out there are still making the mistakes that they’ve been making for decades about how they host their games.
“I’ve seen so many game launches with studios making those mistakes every three years, and not learning. There are a lot of savings to be had for studios that want to listen and who are willing to embrace the technology.
“That technology also excites me. It’s important to remember that any company inevitably builds up technical debt. You’ll have systems that are still around 15 years later, which are in obscure languages. And you have to fix it.
“The reason I invested was that I really liked the fact that Seb [our founder] was using new methodologies, and applying new technologies like Docker and Kubernetes, towards hosting games. So Gameye was able to build up from a blank sheet of paper, without all that technical debt.”
“Oh, well. I mean, I used to run the Multiplay network myself. In fact, I have my own rack at home and have half a petabyte of NAS – backing up Wikipedia, just for fun.
“So I’m a hybrid – I’m an exec, techie, IT guy. I can talk the tech stuff, and then translate it to the non-tech people. I can take the finance stuff and translate it to the tech people.
“Basically, I’m as much a techie and a gamer as I like to build businesses. I like to build things and solve problems. That’s what drives me.”
“Just that if anyone wants to reach out and talk about what mistakes I’ve seen studios make or what challenges the gaming industry is facing, I’d love to chat.”
