Paul Gouge is a games industry entrepreneur and investor, the founder of BattleMail, Rockpool Games, Ironstone Partners, Ideas Pad and Playdemic.
After receiving a degree in economics, Gouge spent two years in investment banking before leaving in 1999 to found his first games company, BattleMail, with Alex Rigby.[1] Their game, BattleMail Kung Fu, was a virally distributed casual massively multiplayer online game that was nominated, unsuccessfully, for a BAFTA award[2] and was later sold to (M)Forma.
In late 2002, Gouge and Rigby founded Rockpool Games, a mobile phone games studio, as well as Ironstone Partners, a video game licensing business. Over the following five years, Rockpool developed mobile games based on major video game licenses and won several major awards.[3] Both businesses were acquired by Eidos Interactive in early 2007[4] for $15m, with Gouge as head of Eidos Play, the firm's casual division, until February 2009.
In late 2010, Gouge and Rigby 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,[5] was launched in August 2010 and, by early 2012, had registered over 10 million users and generated over $10m in virtual goods revenue.
Playdemic's second release was Crossword Buddies,[6] which was 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[7] to help increase its audience.
Gouge was a seed investor in and board advisor to Appatyze, an in-app advertising company.