Studios don't lose money on ambition. They lose it on unpredictability. When throughput stalls, costs drift, or the live operation is slipping, you don't need a framework deck — you need an operator who has run it, with the authority to run the fix.
Fixed price, fixed scope. No lock-in — most studios run the fixes themselves.
Raise closed, headcount doubled, cadence collapsed. Bigger and slower, and the board is asking why.
MAU sags between drops, nobody can say which content earned its cost, so every roadmap argument is a taste argument.
The upgrade and the live roadmap need the same people, and the studio is trying to fund both.
A forensic read of your production system — throughput, cost, and stability. Where the work actually bottlenecks, what it is costing you, and the prioritized moves to fix it. A decision-grade verdict, not a workshop.
For a studio with a live game on fire: incident patterns, release pipeline, patch cadence, and governance. A clear diagnosis of why the operation is bleeding and what to change first.
Live incident right now? Email me — I respond within 24h
Facilitated sessions for studios, publishers, and incubators: design sprints, business-model canvas, and team-formation cohorts.
Fractional COO, Chief of Staff, or Executive Producer — two days a week of senior operating leadership embedded in your studio: scaling teams up or down, running live-service, designing the production system, and holding governance and C-suite cadence. The audit tells you what to fix; this is me helping you fix it. I keep a deliberately small number of concurrent engagements, so the senior operator you meet is the one doing the work — no junior hand-off — and what happens inside your studio stays there.
Engagements are scoped individually. Payment in cash, and — for the right early-stage studio — partly in equity.
GameCraft is a fractional executive producer or studio lead with actual authority, for a company that wants the fix run rather than described. That is the distinction worth settling in the first ten minutes: am I here to tell you, or to do it?
Pre-launch and still deciding what the studio is? That is a different job, and it is advisory rather than executive. firstplayable.se is where founders keep the decisions and I help them think. GameCraft picks up where launch ends — the week live operations begin.
Fixed price, fixed scope. A clear verdict on what is broken and what to do about it.
Most studios act on the audit themselves. Some want help executing.
Fractional COO/EP — two days a week — to install the fixes and run the operation.
No retainers you cannot see the value of.
| Engagement | Format | Anchor price |
|---|---|---|
| Production System Audit | 2 weeks | ~120K SEK |
| Live-Service / Crisis Audit | 2 weeks | ~120K SEK |
| Workshops | per day | from ~20K SEK |
| Fractional COO / Chief of Staff / EP | monthly, ~2 days/wk | from 85K SEK/mo |
Audits are fixed-price and fixed-scope — no overruns. Every engagement scoped individually. Cash, or cash + equity for the right early-stage studio.
I'm Alexander Strandberg. Since 2014 I've been a Production Leader in AAA games — at Avalanche Studios, Ubisoft, and Sharkmob — running live-service production, scaling teams from 40 to 150, optimizing cost and protecting revenue, managing risk, and owning governance and C-suite stakeholder relationships with director-level reports.
I've run live-service production for two major products — as Production Manager on Ubisoft Connect and Executive Producer on theHunter: Call of the Wild. I've scaled organizations up and down through volatility — shifting player needs, technical pivots, and team change — and I've consistently replaced narrative-driven debate with factual, data-grounded decisions.
What I'll own with you: production-system design for throughput, cost and stability · people and performance · live-service operations and releases (incidents, pipelines, patching, DLC).
What I won't pretend to be: I'm a production and operations leader, not a fundraising advisor — if you need that I'll happily connect you to the right people.
Tell me what's going on. A free 30-minute intro call costs you nothing; a two-week audit will tell you what's actually broken — and what to do about it. Share your context below, or email alexander@gamecraft.se.