Richard Moe

Richard started his career* in the industry in 1993 working for a little company called Humongous Entertainment. Working alongside some great talent, including the esteemed Mr. Ron Gilbert, he designed and programmed several of the flagship products that puts smiles on a generation of kids, Pajama Sam and the Backyard Sports line.

He joined Ron Gilbert and Shelley Day in their spin-off company Hulabee Entertainment (coining the name in fact), but that was the right company with the right people at the absolute wrong time. Episodic adventures, advertising, micro-transaction-based virtual worlds - just a few years too early and an Internet Bubble burst away from success.

As a SCUMM and SAUCE expert (proprietary languages for Humongous and Hulabee, respectively), the broader games world was not a hospitable place, so he took a job at a small mobile games company called Metaplay, where he learned to curse at J2ME and BREW code. Then another stint at Atari/Humongous as Creative Director where he tried to get the Backyard Sports brand back on track, to no avail.

A short gig at mobile developer Mobliss was succeeded by a job as Sr. Director of Global Operations for the mobile games group at RealNetworks/Gamehouse, where he oversaw a very successful porting and operations group, actually wrestling the beast of J2ME and BREW into submission - 1500 global handset ports per game across multiple languages with multiple career-specific options, a complex matrix of 100s of 1000s of unique binaries.

Along with the rest of the games industry, Mr. Moe chased after the then lucrative Facebook gaming market, as Head of the Social Games Studio at Gamehouse, creating games like UNO Boost, Collapse Blast, and the short-lived Secret Plant Society. Managing a team of developers (front- and back-end engineering, design, production and QA), he rode the tail end of the wave, learning and preaching the gospel of F2P mechanics and theory before jumping over to help launch Microsoft Studios' Windows 8 portfolio. Quickly becoming the resident expert on all things Windows Store and GaaS, Mr. Moe leveraged his expertise to build out a PMO to support the entirety of the Microsoft Studios Xbox portfolio, across all platforms - mobile, PC, Xbox and other. His long run in games ended with a bold move to non-games business development and evangelism, where he continued to build his operations, product, and program management skills to bring new B2B and B2C experiences to market.

*Actually before his career started, he interned at another little company called Microsoft, where he co-wrote QBasic Gorillas that shipped on MS-DOS 5.0.