The Old Guy in Bengaluru
Joseph Kim's Twitter bio is eleven words: "Old guy building a mobile game dev studio out of Bangalore, India." For someone who has shipped games at FunPlus, SEGA, and NBCUniversal, that bio is doing a lot of work. It is a rebuke of Silicon Valley pretension disguised as a throwaway joke, and it tells you more about how Kim operates than a hundred press releases could.
In 2020, Kim co-founded LILA Games in Bengaluru with Chief Creative Officer Paul Leydon and CTO Avinash Pandey. Not in San Francisco. Not in Los Angeles. In India - deliberately, argumentatively, with full knowledge that the mainstream gaming industry would raise an eyebrow. He had spent the previous few years inside some of the biggest gaming publishing machines in the world. He decided to stop. "I wanted to stop farting around and working at companies where there's a lot of politics and nonsense," he has said. So he left.
"Having worked in publishing with so many game studios, the vast majority of the time is spent talking about problems rather than focusing on solutions. I strongly believe that so many teams would have dramatically higher rates of success if they could fix that about their culture."- Joseph Kim, Deconstructor of Fun
LILA Games now employs 160 people and is building Project Black - a free-to-play extraction shooter for mobile that Kim and his team describe as one of the most ambitious mobile shooter games in development anywhere. The company has raised $12.8M in two rounds: a $2.8M seed backed by BITKRAFT Ventures and Mike Sherrill (co-founder of Machine Zone, the studio behind Game of War), followed by a $10M Series A led by Rainfall Ventures.
Kim's path to building a studio started not with game design, but with circuits. He studied Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at UC Berkeley, graduating in 1995. He went into early startups and management consulting before pivoting hard into the games industry, eventually earning an MBA in Entertainment Management from UCLA Anderson in 2005. The combination is rare: technical bedrock, business fluency, and twenty years in the trenches of mobile gaming.
At FunPlus, Kim led the Strategy Games Division and was central to the launch of King of Avalon: Dragon Warfare - a title that became one of the top-grossing mobile games globally despite deep skepticism from within the team during development. The lesson stuck: conviction over consensus, execution over committee. He then served as Interim General Manager at Demiurge Studios - the Cambridge-based shop behind Marvel Puzzle Quest - before moving to SEGA Networks as Chief Product Officer for the Western Mobile Games Division. At SEGA, he oversaw product management, analytics, and the green-light process for new titles across the portfolio.
NBCUniversal followed. Kim became Senior Vice President of Games and Digital Platforms, overseeing publishing strategy across mobile, PC, and console. Slate decisions. Marketing. User acquisition. Revenue optimization. He was, by any measure, at the top of the publishing pyramid. And then he quit to move to India and build an extraction shooter.
"We're witnessing a renaissance in monetization."- Joseph Kim, Gamesforum
The LILA Games name comes from the Sanskrit word for divine play - or cosmic play - an appropriate label for a studio that is betting India can compete with the world's best game developers. Kim has been candid about the difficulty of that bet. He titled one Deconstructor of Fun podcast episode "From Crying Alone in Bangalore to Panic Attacks at Gamescom" - an unflinching dispatch from the front lines of early startup life that no amount of press-release optimism could replicate.
The culture he is building at LILA is a direct response to what he observed at larger companies. Four values define the studio: direct communication, radical truth and debate, clear accountability, and determined optimism. He runs playtesting sessions, brainstorming meetings, and publicly responds to Glassdoor reviews - treating feedback as data rather than noise. He does actual game design work alongside his team, not just executive oversight.
Beyond LILA, Kim runs GameMakers, a platform and vlog series discussing F2P game development best practices with industry professionals. He has been a regular contributor to Deconstructor of Fun, one of gaming's sharpest analytical voices. He speaks at the India Game Developers Conference (IndiGDC) and has been a guest on podcasts from the Building the Open Metaverse series to Game On! Asia. His argument - that India is on the verge of becoming a genuine global gaming hub - has moved from provocative thesis to observable fact during the five years he has been making it.
Project Black is the proof point he is betting everything on. The title blends the social mechanics of strategy games - the kind Kim helped perfect with King of Avalon - with the intensity of extraction shooters, targeting the free-to-play mobile market. It is an audacious genre bet at an audacious studio scale from an audacious location. Kim is not unaware of the irony. He is building the most demanding genre in gaming with a team in one of the world's most underestimated game development cities, backed by people who have done it before and are willing to do it again.
The old guy in Bengaluru is not waiting for the rest of the industry to catch up.
