Most studios don't fail from lack of talent. They fail because no one ever defined what game they're making.
Leadership, direction, and production support for AAA and AA console & PC studios — from 19 years inside game development. I work with leadership teams to ship the games they're meant to make.
Keynote, Gran Canaria Nomad Fest 2026
19 years in game development. Gameplay Programmer → Lead → Producer.
Shipped and supported AAA console and PC titles at Ubisoft (Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, Assassin's Creed Unity, Rainbow Six Siege), Cloud Chamber / 2K (BioShock 4), and People Can Fly.
The problem
When a game is in trouble, the talent is rarely the problem.
Studios bring in more people, more meetings, more process — and the game still doesn't get closer to done. Because the real problem usually isn't capacity. It's that three things were never made to hold together.
The team can't tell you what game they're making.
Ask ten people what the game is, and you get ten answers. Iteration doesn't converge — it just accumulates. This is a direction problem: the picture of the game and the pillars guiding it were never made sharp enough to steer by.
Every decision waits for someone who isn't in the room.
Work stalls because no one is sure who actually owns the call — so nothing gets decided, or everything escalates upward. This is a leadership problem: the authority to decide, and the accountability for those decisions, was never made clear.
The team keeps learning the same lessons and forgetting them.
Milestones slip, the same problems resurface, and there's no mechanism to turn what the team learns into what the team does next. This is a process problem — not bureaucracy, but the missing loop between learning and deciding.
Direction, leadership, and process. When all three reinforce each other, a team gets clarity, ownership, and the ability to ship without heroics. When they don't, even a talented studio stalls. Getting those three into alignment is the whole of what I do.
About
I'm Lukács Rácz.I spent 19 years making games — ten as a gameplay programmer, nine as a producer, leading multidisciplinary teams, often distributed across studios and time zones. I started at smaller European studios and built that experience across Ubisoft, Cloud Chamber / 2K, and People Can Fly — shipping and supporting AAA console and PC titles.
I've shipped games. I've also watched good studios, full of talented people, cancel projects and lay off teams — not because the talent wasn't there, but because leadership, direction, and process were never made to hold together, and no one named it in time. I've been in the room for that. More than once.
The Leading Game is what I do about it. I work with studios from the outside — as someone who speaks their language, has done the jobs, and has no stake in studio politics — to get leadership teams aligned before that gap becomes a cancelled project.
Real production experience is the foundation of how I work — not management theory. I back it with formal credentials on both sides of what I do: certified coach (Brain-Based Conversation Skills), and a Professional Scrum Master for the production and delivery side.
What it looks like to work together
How I work with studios
1 — Leadership & production training for game studios. Cohort programs for the people running projects: leads stepping into or already in management, directors learning to lead without losing the creative edge, and producers building the skills the industry never trained them in. Built from games, not generic management theory. Modular, scalable to your studio's calendar.
2 — 1:1 coaching for senior leadership. For senior producers, executive producers, studio heads, and the directors carrying the hardest calls. The higher you sit, the lonelier the hard calls get: direction nobody else can set, conversations nobody else can have, decisions that shape whether the project survives. I spent nine years inside studios working alongside leaders at this altitude; I coach from that, not from theory.
3 — Project leadership & direction audits. When a studio needs a focused outside read on a specific project, I run a short, games-native diagnostic on where the leadership team is breaking down — worked through with you, ending in actions you own. The usual starting point for studios where the project is mid-development and something's off.
Working with a first group of studios
The Leading Game is early, deliberately. I'm taking on a small number of founding studio engagements at preferential terms — in exchange for close collaboration and honest feedback as the programs take shape. If you've got leads, directors, or producers who need leadership development built for games — or a project that needs a focused outside read — let's talk. A 30-minute conversation, no pitch, just whether there's a fit.
Notes from inside game leadership
Practical, infrequent writing on why game projects stall and what it takes to ship great games. I'd rather send you something worth reading than something often.
You're in. Talk soon.
