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Michael Martinez
CEO & Co-Founder - FunCraft
Michael Martinez is the CEO and Co-Founder of FunCraft, a gaming company based in San Francisco, California.1 He has extensive experience in the gaming industry, with a career spanning over a decade.
Career Highlights
FunCraft: Martinez founded FunCraft in August 2019, where he focuses on creating casual games that become daily rituals for players.1 The company aims to be a home for gamemakers passionate about the craft of making and shipping games.1
Previous Roles: Before FunCraft, Martinez held several notable positions:
- Studio GM at Electronic Arts (EA) from May 2016 to July 20191
- Founder/CEO of Juicebox Games from October 2012 to May 20161
- Senior Product Manager and Product Manager at Zynga from April 2009 to September 20121
Achievements
At Juicebox Games, Martinez:
- Shipped successful games like HonorBound and StormBorn, reaching a community of 5 million players1
- Generated $10 million in player spending1
- Achieved high rankings, including #31 grossing iPhone game in the US for HonorBound1
- Built a team of 36 employees1
- Raised $2.5 million in funding from notable investors1
Education
Martinez holds a BA in Economics modified with Engineering and Classical Studies from Dartmouth College.1
Approach to Game Development
Martinez emphasizes the importance of data-driven decision-making in game development and user acquisition.2 He believes in creating games that players can enjoy for years and focuses on building a strong team of passionate gamemakers.13
Industry Perspective
Martinez has shared insights on various aspects of the gaming industry:
- He sees opportunities in the instability around marketing in the current gaming landscape2
- He advises app developers to trust their data for driving profitable user acquisition2
- Martinez has expressed caution about embracing blockchain and web3 technologies, comparing them to other hype cycles in the industry5
Michael Martinez's LinkedIn username is martinezmichaelj, where he regularly shares updates and insights about FunCraft and the gaming industry.4
Highlights
Sexy resumes don't easily seduce our team 🥱
We’re looking for a special kind of team player: a senior expert with the drive to get their hands dirty 👊🏽
Many senior leaders want to ascend the management ladder and avoid the day-to-day work. However, we don’t think hierarchical structures produce the best outcomes.
In our experience, the highest quality work - and the fastest improvements - come from senior experts engaged in the intimate details of our business 💯
Finding unicorns🦄 to fit our preferred employee profile takes a lot of time. But when we do, we give them what they want most: autonomy and responsibility. They have our trust to make sh*t happen from day 1.
Jason McGuirk and I spent years at big studios where leaders spent more time pontificating in meetings than shipping games. We designed our hiring strategy to avoid that pitfall ❌
My two cents:
If you want sluggish growth, hire people who want to lead from the tower 🗼
If you want your team to move fast, hire leaders who lead on the frontline 💪🏼
Working for Zynga in its heyday was like riding a rocket ship - the kind that can’t exist anymore 🚀
My co-founder, Jason McGuirk, and I witnessed the mainstream rise of mobile gaming and watched Zynga grow to 4,000 people in less than two years. It was a wild ride and an amazing learning experience. One we’ll never see again for mobile in the same way.
That market today is saturated. Competition is fiercer than ever and the big guns (Microsoft, Supercell, T2) are defending their turf. Fewer mobile game companies will become unicorns 🦄
That doesn’t mean there aren’t possibilities for lucrative outcomes though 🤔 There are compelling, new models for success in mobile gaming. If you have visions of Zynga at its peak, a sub-$500M outcome may seem underwhelming. But we think those can be tremendous outcomes, especially if you can get there without a massive team 💪
FunCraft’s revenue today resembles the figures I recall from some of Zynga’s top studios. But we operate very differently.
At Zynga, a studio of 60 to 150 people would hyperfocus on a single game. At FunCraft, our studio successfully operates multiple games with far fewer people. We’re more efficient and less dependent on a single game. We’ve set ourselves up to keep spinning off new games that leverage all the systems we have built.
Jason and I are grateful for the experiences we had at Zynga. They gave us a strong foundation in the mobile game industry 🙏
But success today requires our model and expectations to evolve. The sexiest goal is to rapidly scale new games - not our team size - successfully 💯
