Hello and Welcome
back to another addition to the Confetti industry week website.
Today, we welcome an incredibly successful man onto the
stage, after working at Games workshop at a high level, he did the unthinkable
of walking away from such security of a high level job, while admitting that
his main drive was fuelled by stupidity he stuck with it and made his dream a
reality.
After realising when he was reasonably young that he liked
Fantasy Sci-Fi toys, he embarked on his career with passion and determination,
he then started working for Games Workshop, little did he know, he would be
standing face to face with them in the industry years later!
He worked for a while in games workshop, and turned rags into
riches because by 2007 they were turning over an impressive 120 million, in
good time, Ronnie went on to complete an MBA at the London Business School, and
between now and then, had gained a large amount of grey hair!
Mantic games were born after he jumped off the cliff and
left Games workshop, but he wasn’t done there, he decided that Mantic Games
weren’t going to be his only venture in business, thus prompting in his
inclusion to the Plumen team, who have currently created an award winning,
energy saving light bulb, Winning the Brit Design of the year in 2012.
Both ventures are currently fighting hard and doing
exceptionally well, with Mantic’s Dreadball and Plumen’s light bulb both
breaking the $1 million dollar sales barrier. He admitted that Mantic did take
a while to really get going, and swallowed a lot of funding early on, but it
recuperated with the aid of Kickstarter, which is an impressive system in which
the audience can help to fund said project, and make it blossom into reality.
After Mantic’s previous success with Kickstarter, Ronnie
spoke of his delight of this, and plans to use Kickstarter again in the future,
introducing new titles and hoping to get even more funding to aid his cause to
bring table top gaming back to the forefront in gaming, and he is doing a
brilliant job with Dreadball. I will admit this, I haven’t really heard of
Dreadball before today, but I am now wanting to try this and maybe get into
making this table top game a hobby.
Nearer the end of the session, it was again opened up to
questions and he was bombarded with a few great questions and had given some
great answers, but mainly the questions focused on his time with the games
workshop, and how he would compete with them in the industry. He admitted
during this time, that Games Workshop are going to be very hard to work with
and why wouldn’t they be? They earn a colossal amount of money, but Mantic are
aiming to put themselves right there at the top, breaking into the top 5 in
their section in the industry. More questions flooded about Kickstarter, which
also lead to him admitting, that Kickstarter can put a lot of pressure on
products and to get them out, as it does.
Ronnie gave out some key information about his ventures and
this was greatly appreciated judging by the amount of questions he received
nearer the end of the session.
“Know what you do,
and do it well.”
Thank you for reading
this blog
By Nick Mason, Level 3 Gaming student
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