The BBC weekly The Boss features several business leaders from around the world. This week we talk to Andrew Day, CEO of the computer game developer Words Studios.
Andrew Day knows from personal experience how addicting some computer games can be.
"I have one of those horrible personalities, that if I open a game, I find out, before I know where I am, that I spent tens of hours there," says the 56-year-old.
"In 2013 ... I went for a little break, I was lying next to a swimming pool with nothing to do. So I picked up the phone and started playing Candy Crush.
"It was in June. I had to give up my new year's resolutions the following year because I was wasting so much time on the game. So yes, I have to be a little careful."
Andrew is CEO of the Irish company Keywords Studios. Even if you're an avid gamer, you may not have heard of the Dublin-based company.
However, the company helped create many of the world's most popular games: from Call of Duty to World of Warcraft, Fortnite, Clash of Clans, League of Legends, Assassin's Creed and the aforementioned Candy Crush.
"The full list of games we've worked on is slightly endless," says Andrew.
Keywords employs 7,500 people in 59 offices worldwide, from Montreal to Tokyo, and in 2019 it had annual sales of € 326.5 million ($ 369 million; £ 295 million).
The business remains under the radar because it does not release games under its own name. Instead it is employed by the largest gaming companies in the world to help them make their products.
It does everything from producing entire games, to parts of them, or managing the transfer from one platform to another, like running an Xbox game on PlayStation.
Or he will design and build all the visual aspects of a game, everything you see, like the characters, the buildings and the weapons. "All of these are digital goods and are produced by artists, and we are the largest video game providers in the world," says Andrew.
In addition, Keywords offers a test service for almost completed games, to verify their correct functioning. And it has an audio business where actors - famous or less famous - provide the voices and dialogues of a game, and add all the music and sound effects.
In addition, the company is the world's largest provider of game translation services, converting games into over 50 languages.
So after a game has been released, Keywords has a staff that offers customer support under a customer's name. So if you call a game company asking for help to move on to the next level, you may actually be contacted by the employees of Keywords.
It's a big deal for Andrew to do, and while the coronavirus has temporarily cut its wings, it typically spends "half of my time" traveling the world.
It is very different from the humble beginnings of Keywords in 1998, when Andrew's friend Giorgio Guastalla founded a small company in Dublin that offers translation services to corporate software vendors. It grew slowly until Andrew was asked to join and lead the company in 2009, when he was now operating exclusively in the gaming industry.
"He asked me for a number of years, he thought I could really grow and do something about the business," says Andrew. "At the time there were only 50 people in an office in Dublin."
Andrew was born and raised in South Africa. He and his family moved to the UK when he was 16, settling near London. After earning a bachelor's degree in management from Bradford University, he later had a varied career in business.
He started working for the Rothmans cigarette company, before moving on to mergers and acquisitions in various sectors, to then specialize in the technological sphere.
Andrew's plan for keywords was a major expansion, aided by the use of his knowledge of the organization of acquisitions to purchase companies, which would allow the company to expand the services it could offer to gaming companies. His participation in the business happily coincides with the huge growth in the popularity of computer games over the past decade.
To accelerate growth and acquisitions, Andrew launched keywords in the London Stock Exchange's AIM market in 2013, which raised approximately £ 30 million.
"It was a rare example of identifying an opportunity, having that vision, then creating a business plan and following it religiously," says Andrew.
Technology broker analyst Patrick O'Donnell of Irish broker Goodbody says, "Andrew Day was key to the keywords.
"Keywords has completed over 40 acquisitions under Andrew's leadership and is now a customer of 23 of the world's top 25 video game publishers and all 10 major game developers for mobile devices," he says.
All of these companies use keywords because it is cheaper and more convenient for them to give them the job of doing it rather than employing much more staff internally. "We have plans to do," says Andrew. "So if the casinos did this work internally, at the end of a certain project they could have only had the staff seated."
Andrew says Keywords has no plans to release their games or, as he says, "bite the hands that feed him." Instead he thinks the company will grow to see an annual turnover of 1 billion euros, such is the growing demand for its services, from a gaming sector with total revenues of over 159 billion dollars (£ 127 billion) per year. .
However, he is still wary of the game itself. "I find it difficult to put down a game. I want to complete it, to move to the next level. Or if I am playing the same level over and over again, I want to do it faster, or jump higher or catch more coins. It appeals to my personality rather sadly. . "
