Michael: I’m CEO of 5518 Studios and I’ve been in the game industry for almost 20 years now. I started working at EA for about 8 years before transitioning to Disney and working on games like “Where’s My Water?”. I’m actually super proud of having worked and created an IP for Disney.

After working a few years there, I joined a small start-up company called Scopely. They were just getting into mobile games and I helped build up that business from a creative standpoint.

Along the way, I met Maxim as a provider for me and my different companies, and we built a strong friendship. One day Max and I looked at each other and thought: “We can do better”, so we created 5518 Studios. There are so many outsourcing companies out there and they do fantastic work, but what makes us different is our background: we know how to make games and have actually rolled up our sleeves making games, so we actually know what it takes to deliver an end product at a certain quality and standard.

What makes us different too is that we find ourselves as strategic partners rather than an outsourcing company. You can pay someone to make something for you but not actually to invest, to be passionate and to drive the creative. We set ourselves as partners and the extension to our partner’s teams in order to really feel like that tight-knit family and invest in it. At the end of the day, it’s about the millions of people who are going to play the games we work on; that’s who we’re making the game for. 5518 Studios started in 2016 so we’re a relatively young company.

Maxim: But we already have over 15 partners, quite a lot. They are all great partners, clients, and friends.

Michael: Yes we work with both large and small companies. With smaller and younger companies, we are not just strategic partners but we also mentor their teams. Because there’s a lot of past trouble that we’ve been down that we don’t want people to go down.

We work on a large spectrum of projects: from mobile to Steam, to console, to PC. Our division is broken off between “casual” and “mid-core”.

The name behind our company is actually a very interesting story. In the beginning, we couldn’t find the right name. But one day, I was booking a ticket for Russia and my daughter came in and she’s like: “Daddy, show me where Russia is”. So I pulled out the map and showed it to her, and she said: “Wow that’s far, how far is it?”. I googled it and it was 5518 miles, from our office in Los Angeles to our office in Saint-Petersburg. And that’s how the name popped up.

What’s nice about it too, and we realized this afterward, is when we started going to conferences and we looked at the brochure and we were like: “Oh my god, we’re the first one on the brochure! That’s right it goes alphabetical and numeric starts first! We’re always going to be first!”.

Concerning our upcoming projects, we’re collaborating with a studio, and it’s the first time we’re going to actually have a revenue share in this product, which will probably be released this summer. So we’re taking a strategic investment of not only having our outsourcing company, but we’re doing a shared business model to actually physically create a game. We’re super excited about having our very first game on the market, it’s just phenomenal.