Joe Minton

The game industry is not for the faint of heart. It’s a wonderful place where passionate people create the dominant form of worldwide entertainment. It’s also an unforgiving arena where platforms of play come and go, genres rise and fall, business models change, regulations and global politics intrude, and the cutthroat nature of high-stakes business works uncomfortably hand-in-hand with creatives looking to bring their visions to life. It’s a landscape of plenty where getting your game noticed is a feat, only then to find out whether it is also loved by enough people to support all it has taken to build, market, and maintain this interactive creation.

Running a game development studio long ago formed my love of independent studios striving against the odds to bring games to life and support themselves in the process. Over time, I found myself naturally drawn to the business side of things. For my next role, I chose to focus my efforts on building a business agency designed from the ground up to serve the game industry. I believe that when the creatives participate fairly in success and aren’t given the short end of the stick, the whole industry is healthier.

With this vision, DDM was bootstrapped starting in 2006 to disrupt the agency landscape by relying solely on success fees for representation work. Our core philosophy for this service is that we risk our costs, and if we are unable to secure work for our clients, we gain no benefit. It was important to us that we provided tangible benefits to development studios: worldwide business development to improve the odds of securing deals, market intelligence to ensure a studio’s plans are informed by the current buyers’ network, and guidance on platforms, pricing, business models, and contractual terms.

Over all these years, the company has grown while our core values have remained consistent. This team of wonderful humans embodies DDM’s values of being trustworthy, inclusive, collaborative, and professional. We offer three services: our initial offering of game studio Representation, Investment Services for game industry-related companies, and Consulting to help companies build a strategy and execute upon it in this ever-changing business. With our roots in games, we bridge into all other forms of entertainment to ensure alignment for interactive alongside linear, tabletop, book, music, and more.