Ben Liu

Mid-stride in a game that isn't over

In 2009, when most serious technologists were still treating the App Store as a curiosity, Ben Liu looked at the first iPhone games and saw the future of entertainment. He took a job as Electronic Arts' very first iPhone Product Manager - not a senior role, not a safe bet - and started figuring out what a great mobile game could actually be.

Three years later, he was running Pocket Gems as CEO. Three years after that, Tencent - the company that owns WeChat, League of Legends, and a controlling stake in Epic Games - put $60 million into the studio. Then $90 million more. The total haul: $155 million, most of it from a Chinese gaming giant that bets on very few Western studios.

Pocket Gems, under Liu, builds two things: War Dragons, a real-time 3D strategy game where players collectively fought close to 2 billion battles in 2016 alone, and Episode, an interactive storytelling platform where more than 25 million people have become authors of their own mobile dramas. Hollywood came calling - Mean Girls, Pretty Little Liars, Demi Lovato - not because Pocket Gems chased the IP, but because Episode built the audience first.

Liu is not a founder in the conventional sense - Pocket Gems was started in 2009 by Daniel Terry and Harlan Crystal. But the studio most people know today - the one with 200+ employees, the Tencent backing, the two genre-defining franchises - is largely his construction. He joined as COO in 2011, became CEO in 2012 when Terry stepped aside, and has been building ever since. The population of Pocket Gems grew from 10 people to more than 200 on his watch.

What makes Liu unusual is the specific combination of things he has done. Investment banking at CS First Boston. Corporate strategy at Disney. Game production at Pandemic Studios, where he worked on Destroy All Humans!. The COO role at Playdom, where he built City of Wonder into one of the defining social games of the Facebook era. He arrived at Pocket Gems carrying a map made from all of it - finance, strategy, production, distribution, growth.

Two bets on what mobile can be

The two games reveal something deliberate about Liu's thinking. War Dragons chases graphical richness and real-time competition - it wants to feel like a console title that happens to run on glass. Episode does the opposite: it hands creative control to the audience and watches what they make. One game is produced; the other is a platform. Both are free-to-play. Both are Pocket Gems' core.

$155 million, mostly from Tencent

Sequoia seeded Pocket Gems in 2010 alongside angel investors Michael Dearing, Jeff Fluhr, and Omar Hamoui. Five years later, Tencent noticed and wrote a $60 million check. Two years after that, Tencent doubled down with $90 million more - an unusual move that signals genuine conviction rather than passive portfolio positioning.

For context: Tencent has invested in or acquired portions of Riot Games, Epic Games, Ubisoft, Supercell, and dozens of others. The Pocket Gems investment is not one of its headline bets. But the fact that they returned at a higher amount, after seeing the financials close-up, says something about what they found inside.

From First Boston to War Dragons

Liu's path is not the one the games industry tells itself. He didn't ship his first mod at 14. He didn't study computer science and fall into mobile. He took the route that looks inefficient until you see where he ended up.

After earning dual degrees at Stanford - Electrical Engineering and Economics simultaneously - he went into investment banking at CS First Boston, analyzing technology companies. Then to Disney for corporate strategic planning. Then back to Stanford for his MBA, where he graduated as an Arjay Miller Scholar, the distinction given to the top 10% of the graduating class.

The pivot to games came at Pandemic Studios, where Liu produced game titles and built an understanding of what it takes to ship. Then Electronic Arts, where he became the first iPhone Product Manager in the company's history - the person whose job was to figure out what EA should actually be doing on a platform that had only just arrived. Then Playdom, where he ran the studio that made City of Wonder, a social game that achieved both critical and commercial success before Disney acquired the whole company.

He joined Pocket Gems as COO in 2011. A year later, founders Terry and Crystal handed him the CEO role. The company had 10 people. It now has more than 200.

Sequence of moves

Shipping before it's perfect

Liu has a specific view about when to release: as soon as the game's core feels right, get it in front of players and watch what happens. Not because polish doesn't matter, but because the feedback from actual humans playing an actual game is worth more than another month of internal iteration.

His formula for a mobile hit is specific: "It starts with a fun game that players love. The game needs to be broadly appealing to a large enough community of players through a combination of fantasy, marketing appeal, and novelty. You need some luck and magic." Most game developers won't say that last part out loud. Liu does.

On the competition question - how Pocket Gems stays relevant against studios with ten times the headcount and budget - Liu's answer is directional rather than defensive. Don't watch what others are building. Build what you think is next. The studios that copy can only ever catch up; they can't get ahead.

The community-first approach shapes how Pocket Gems manages its live games. Episode's 25 million creators are not users; they're co-developers who generate content that the platform distributes. War Dragons gets live events, player summits, and direct feedback loops between the studio and its most engaged players. The $1B+ in cumulative revenue the studio has generated runs through that relationship.

Where to find more