Simon Carless

The industry's most useful outsider

There is a specific kind of person who sees an industry clearly only after they stop being inside it. Simon Carless is that person for video games.

For sixteen years he was one of the most influential institutional figures in game development - publisher of Gamasutra, editor of Game Developer Magazine, chairman of the Independent Games Festival, and eventually Executive Vice President overseeing the Game Developers Conference itself. He was embedded so deep in the machinery that he practically was the machinery.

Then, in September 2020, he left.

What he built next is more useful than anything he did before. GameDiscoverCo is a newsletter, a data platform, and a consultancy that answers one deceptively simple question: how do players actually find, buy, and enjoy video games? That question, it turns out, is worth $250,000 a year to the game studios who need the answer badly enough.

He is not a pundit predicting the future. He is an analyst explaining the present. The difference is everything.

Simon Carless grew up in Britain doing what a very specific type of 1980s teenager did: he sat in front of an Amiga computer making music. Not for fun, exactly - though it was fun - but as a participant in the demoscene, a global underground community of programmers, musicians, and artists who competed to make the most impressive things their hardware could do.

He went by "Hollywood." Later, "h0l." He composed modular music for demogroups including Jetset/Skid Row and Axis. The demoscene taught him something that no business school would have: creative communities have energy that institutions can never fully replicate.

He took that lesson to Durham University, graduated with a History degree in 1996, and immediately did something unusual for a history graduate - he founded a netlabel.

Monotonik launched in 1996, distributing free electronic music online in .mod formats before Bandcamp was a thought, before SoundCloud was invented, before streaming was a concept anyone had monetized. He ran it for thirteen years. When he finally put it on hiatus in 2009, he archived the catalog on the Internet Archive, because he already understood that the things you build deserve to survive you.

After Durham, Carless was hired into game design at Simis (which became Kuju Entertainment) - specifically because of his demoscene background. He worked on Terracide in 1997 (writing the intro script), then Tank Racer, then projects at Eidos and Atari.

He is disarmingly honest about this chapter: "I enjoyed it, but I didn't really feel like I had a full skillset. Like I can't really program, and I felt like that was sort of holding me back."

What he could do was write, observe, and explain. He edited the games section at Slashdot, one of the loudest corners of the early internet. In 2004, he published Gaming Hacks with O'Reilly Media - a 100-tip book covering console modding, emulators, LAN gaming, and MMORPGs. It sold. Editors noticed.

That same year, UBM hired him. His real career was about to begin.

When Simon Carless joined UBM in 2004 as Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of Gamasutra and Game Developer Magazine, he was walking into the most important trade media in the games industry. Gamasutra was where developers went to think. Game Developer Magazine was what they read on the plane to GDC. Both mattered enormously.

He had first attended GDC as a developer in 1998. He returned as an organizer in 2005. Seven years apart, the same conference - but an entirely different position in the room.

In 2007, he co-founded the Independent Games Summit at GDC. This sounds like a footnote. It wasn't. The summit created a permanent home for independent developers inside the world's largest professional game conference, at a moment when indie gaming was shifting from hobbyist curiosity to genuine cultural force. Games like Braid, Super Meat Boy, and Spelunky were still ahead. The infrastructure for celebrating and developing them needed to exist first.

He became Chairman of the Independent Games Festival - the awards program that legitimized indie games as art - and later Chairman Emeritus. He rose to Global Brand Director, then to Executive Vice President of Informa, overseeing both GDC and Black Hat (the major information security conference). The same person, the same instincts, applied across two entirely different industries.

Why Game Discovery is Harder Than It Looks

Ask most developers how players find their games and you'll get an answer about trailers, press kits, and Steam page optimization. Carless's answer is longer and less comfortable.

Discovery is not a marketing problem. It's a system problem. Algorithms, timing, pricing, genre positioning, comparable titles, platform relationships, trailer cut-points, launch-window choices, regional markets - these all interact in ways that most studios never fully understand because they only ship one or two games in their entire existence. Carless has watched thousands.

The data he collects, curates, and synthesizes gives small studios the comparative market intelligence that large publishers have always taken for granted. The first-time developer can now understand where their game sits in a market context, not just how it's performing in isolation.

That shift - from "how is my game doing" to "how is my game doing relative to everything else" - is what makes GameDiscoverCo genuinely useful rather than just informative.

The Numbers Behind the Headlines