Paul Gouge


Paul Gouge is a games industry entrepreneur and investor, the founder of BattleMail, Rockpool Games, Ironstone Partners, Ideas Pad and Playdemic.

Career

BattleMail

After receiving a degree in economics, Gouge spent 2 years in investment banking before leaving in 1999 to found his first games company with Alex Rigby, BattleMail. Their game, Battlemail, was a virally distributed casual MMO that was nominated for a BAFTA award and was sold to Forma.

Rockpool Games/Ironstone Partners

In late 2002 Gouge and Alex Rigby founded Rockpool Games, a mobile phone games studio, as well as Ironstone Partners, a video game licensing business. Over the next 5 years Rockpool developed mobile games based on major video game licenses and won several major awards. Both businesses were acquired for $15m by Eidos Interactive in early 2007,. with Gouge acting as head of Eidos Play, the firms casual division, until February 2009.

Playdemic

In late 2010 Paul and Alex Rigby then founded Playdemic., a European independent social games company that develops and operates game services for social networks and mobile devices. The company’s first release, Gourmet Ranch, launched in August 2010 and by early 2012 had registered over 10m users and generated over $10m in virtual goods revenue.
Playdemic's second release was Crossword Buddies, which launched on Facebook in February 2012 and became available on iPhone and iPad in May 2012. On 8 March 2012 Playdemic signed a distribution deal with Zynga to help increase its audience.

Appatyze

Gouge was a seed investor in and Board advisor to Appatyze an in-app advertising company.