Pilot 2Be first in the next cohort.Join Discord for launch updates and early access.Join Discord

Join Discord for launch updates and early access.

Company

Built fromlived problems.

We did not start with a theory. We started with a problem we had lived.GameDataCore is built by people who have shipped games, pitched publishers, raised funding, scoped projects, greenlit them, launched them, and watched the same pattern repeat: important decisions made without evidence strong enough to carry the room.We are building the evidence layer we would have wanted to work from.

Where we came from

We did not start with a theory. We started with a problem we had lived.

We have shipped games across AAA, AA, indie, and mobile. We have pitched publishers, raised funding, scoped projects, greenlit them, launched them, or watched them stall. And we have watched the same pattern repeat. Encouraging feedback. Positive early signals. Strong creative vision. Followed by hesitation in the greenlight room, friction in the funding round, projects that quietly slipped, or games that struggled to find an audience once they shipped.

Not because the work wasn't good. Because when the high-stakes decisions came, nobody in the room had a defensible way to demonstrate audience reality, market context, or risk. Not the studio. Not the publisher. Not the investor. The conversation was shaped by whoever spoke with the most conviction, which is not the same as whoever was most correct.

We watched project viability argued without evidence. We watched competitive positioning go unbenchmarked. We watched resources allocated on assumption rather than on what the signals supported. We watched critical player concerns surface weeks or months after the window to act on them had closed.

These were not theoretical problems. They were lived ones. GameDataCore is what we built because we were tired of being in rooms where the quality of the decision came down to the quality of the evidence, and the evidence was not there.

Now we are making it available to everyone working under the same conditions.

What we believe

Most game decisions are made in uncertainty. They should not be.

That is not a criticism of the people making them. It is a criticism of the conditions they are making them in. Disconnected data. Unstructured feedback. Gut feeling dressed up as insight. A market that rewards confidence but rarely provides the evidence to justify it.

And increasingly, a market that has decided AI-generated summaries are an acceptable substitute for the evidence itself. They are not. A confident-sounding answer from a model that cannot show its working is not insight. It is the same problem in a new costume: hallucination where there used to be gut feel, and both leaving the person in the room without anything they can defend.

The hard truth is that if our system helps more studios cancel the wrong games earlier, then it is meeting its goal. GameDataCore is built on the hope of making more studios sustainable, and sometimes that means killing your darlings earlier and pivoting while you still can.

GameDataCore is built on the belief that better evidence produces better decisions, and that better decisions produce better games. Not by replacing creative judgment, but by informing it. Not by generating answers, but by surfacing what the signals actually support.

Evidence informs. Creativity decides.

Why now

These are not new questions. They are newly answerable ones.

For a long time, this kind of system was not practical. Player feedback was too unstructured. Analytics tools were built to optimise metrics, not to support judgment. The technology required to model emotional nuance, motivation, and behaviour together at scale did not yet exist.

That has changed. Advances in language modelling, behavioural analysis, and modern data infrastructure now make it possible to interpret emotional intensity, expectation, and player intent without collapsing complexity into simplistic scores.

The industry around it has shifted too. Since mid-2023, funding has tightened, development costs have kept rising, and greenlight and portfolio decisions have come under real scrutiny. The question “why are you sure this will work?” used to be answerable with “because I've done this before.” It no longer is. Reputation and confidence are necessary; they are not sufficient.

GameDataCore exists because the technical capability and the industry's demand for justification converged, and because the people building it knew from experience what teams actually needed.

Not more analytics. A shared evidence layer for making irreversible decisions defensible.

Who we are

GameDataCore is built by people who have shipped games. Our platform encodes decades of hard-won domain experience into infrastructure. This is not machine learning applied to generic data. It is judgment shaped by years of commercial decisions under uncertainty, turned into systems that support the same decisions for other people.

Justin French

Founder, CEO and system architect

Seventeen years across AAA, indie, audio, and studio leadership — a cross-discipline developer and award-winning studio founder who built Dream Harvest Games over a decade, turning ambitious concepts into commercial, award-winning realities. Audio production credits include BioWare, CD Projekt, Rare, and Creative Assembly; background in maths, technical audio implementation, and design tooling architecture. At GameDataCore, Justin is founder, CEO, and system architect — building the Decision OS and evidence layer he would have wanted when greenlighting, funding, and shipping games.

David Steffen

Founder, CTO and full-stack engineer

Fourteen years as a full-stack engineer across industries, stacks, and cloud platforms — production-grade APIs and data platforms on AWS, GCP, and Azure. Brings deep experience in Python, Elixir, JavaScript, CI/CD, containerisation, and scalable architecture to the systems beneath GameDataCore. Built the company's entire technical stack: the evidence engine, ingestion and orchestration layer, and the platform studios use day to day.

Simon Sparks

Founder, COO and people & operations

Sixteen years across games, creative industries, and organisational leadership — an award-winning producer and former studio head who specialises in player insight, team culture, and turning emotional feedback into commercial advantage. Co-founded Splendy Interactive; later Head of Talent at Polystream and part of the team through their exit to Mythical Games. At GameDataCore, Simon shapes people, process, and partnerships — connecting the evidence layer to how studios actually decide and work together.

Fred Mulligan

Head of data science

Fifteen-plus years building machine learning systems, data platforms, and decision-support products across marketplaces, SaaS, and technology ventures. Led large-scale analytical infrastructure and ML products at LTK before founding an independent publishing and analytics platform spanning data engineering, search, recommendation systems, and AI-driven workflows. Combines advanced economics, statistics, and machine learning with founder-level experience translating complex data into actionable intelligence, predictive models, and scalable software products.

Toby Allen

Product and go-to-market

Twenty-plus years leading product, technology, and venture teams across gaming, XR, and SaaS. Built and scaled MetaGravity's Quark engine from R&D to commercial launch; previously led HoloLens product development at Microsoft. Combines deep game industry insight with hands-on experience in products, partnerships, and ecosystems at the intersection of games, AI, and frontier tech — exited several companies and active in the Games Angels Network.

Richard Gittins

Brand and marketing

Twenty-plus years leading marketing, publishing, and commercial strategy across games, film, and entertainment. Senior leadership at Creative Assembly, 505 Games, Codemasters, and 20th Century Fox, launching and growing globally recognised brands and franchises. Translates complex AI and data technologies into clear positioning, category-defining narratives, and effective go-to-market strategy.

Andrew Gin

Full stack & data engineer

Eighteen-plus years building data-intensive, mission-critical systems across energy, finance, cybersecurity, and SaaS, with a strong foundation in security, distributed systems, and networking. Led high-reliability data pipelines for regulated energy markets — meter data ingestion, settlement, payment calculation, and optimisation with full auditability and explainability. At GameDataCore, Andrew ensures the data layer is robust, traceable, and defensible — the operational rigour required for trusted evidence and scalable decision systems.

Adam Merchant

ML & data engineer

Eight-plus years building data-intensive scientific software in diagnostics and time-series analytics, with a foundation in theoretical physics, numerical methods, and machine learning. Led modular, high-reliability data processing pipelines for complex time-series and multi-dimensional data — metric extraction, performance monitoring, and comparative analysis with strong emphasis on validation, traceability, and system behaviour. At GameDataCore, Adam owns data pipeline engineering, deployment infrastructure, annotation system design, and DevOps support — keeping data flows reliable, scalable, and production-ready while supporting continuous model improvement.

Where we are

Brighton based, remote first.

GameDataCore is founded in Brighton, UK, one of the country's most active game development hubs, and operates as a remote-first company.

Brighton's mix of independent studios, established developers, and creative technologists has shaped our perspective: creative, collaborative, pragmatic, and grounded in real production experience.

We remain closely connected to the UK and European game development ecosystem through active partnerships, pilot projects, and industry collaboration.

For Investors

We're actively exploring investment opportunities to support the next phase of growth.

The investor pack is built the same way the product is: structured, evidenced, defensible. Read our manifesto on the site, or request the investment memorandum, manifesto deck, and execution deck (product, traction, defensibility) on request.

Request investor materials

A games industry that acts on truth, not assumption.

We believe we are building it. We want other studios to have it sooner than we did.