AboutGameDataCore
We build decision intelligence for the games industry.
Our OriginLived on the wrong side.
GameDataCore was founded by people who've lived on the wrong side of these decisions.
After more than 17 years working across AAA, AA, and indie game development — and over a decade running an independent studio — our CEO, Justin French, experienced the same pattern repeatedly: encouraging feedback from players and peers, positive early signals, strong creative vision — and critical player concerns surfaced too late. Followed by hesitation, funding friction, or stalled projects once real commitments were required.
Not because the games were bad — but because there was no unified, defensible way to demonstrate audience reality, market context, or risk at the moment those decisions mattered most.
This fragmentation meant:
Project viability was difficult to justify to publishers and investors
Competitive positioning was poorly benchmarked
Resources were allocated based on assumptions rather than evidence
Critical player concerns surfaced too late
These weren't theoretical problems — they were lived ones.
Why This Matters NowThe industry has shifted.
Since mid-2023, the industry has shifted decisively.
Publishers and investors have become significantly more risk-averse, while development costs continue to rise. Greenlight, funding, and portfolio decisions now require clearer justification — not just confidence, reputation, or intuition.
Yet most studios still rely on disconnected tools that answer narrow questions, rather than supporting the actual decisions being made.
GameDataCore exists to close that gap.
Intelligence must be infrastructureNot another dashboard.
GameDataCore is not an analytics platform layered on top of existing tools. We are building the foundational data layer that every tool, team, and decision flows through.
Rendering has Unreal and Unity. Creation has Roblox and UEFN. Infrastructure has AWS for Games. Platforms have Steamworks and PSN. But no one has built the data layer — the intelligence substrate that unifies player, community, production, and financial reality.
Our goal is to become that missing layer in the games stack.
The missing layerin the games stack.
Today's fragmented approach means the Steam dashboard shows one thing, the analytics platform another, the Discord bot something else, and the BI tool yet another. But no one knows which is the root cause, which fixes will actually work, or what the ROI of each option is.
Studios need a nervous system that connects player feedback, behaviour, emotions, studio decisions, and market context into one unified causal model. GameDataCore is that nervous system.
Truth dies in the gaps between systems.
Our ApproachDecision intelligence, not dashboards.
GameDataCore is not a dashboard platform.
We don't optimise metrics, chase engagement, or attempt to replace judgement with automation.
Instead, we focus on decision intelligence — helping teams understand where confidence is real, where risk hides, and which choices can't be undone.
We do this by connecting:
Internal budgets, team rosters and design documentation
Market and comparative evidence
Behavioural and contextual signals
Player feedback and emotional intensity (valence, arousal, dominance)
Into a unified evidence layer that supports high-stakes reasoning — before, during, and after irreversible commitments.
Our goal is not certainty. It's defensible understanding.
How We Treat EvidenceInterpretable, comparable, honest.
GameDataCore is built on the belief that evidence is only useful if it is interpretable, comparable, and honest about uncertainty.
We do not collapse complex player behaviour into single scores or binary sentiment labels. Instead, we model emotional intensity, motivation, behaviour, and context as interacting signals — and preserve disagreement where it exists.
Our systems are designed to surface:
Where confidence is warranted — and where it is not
Where they conflict
Where signals converge
We don't tell teams what to decide. We make it clear what is defensible — and what is not.
Why This Exists NowA newly solvable question.
For a long time, this kind of system simply wasn't practical.
Player feedback was too unstructured, analytics tools were built to optimise metrics rather than support judgement, and the technology required to model emotional nuance, motivation, and behaviour together at scale did not yet exist.
That has changed.
Advances in language modelling, behavioural analysis, and modern data infrastructure now make it possible to interpret emotional intensity, expectation, and player intent without collapsing complexity into simplistic scores.
GameDataCore exists because these capabilities converged — and because the people building it recognised that what teams needed wasn't more analytics, but a shared evidence layer for making irreversible decisions defensible.
This isn't a new question. It's a newly solvable one.
This isn't a new question. It's a newly solvable one.
Our TeamWho builds it.
GameDataCore is built by people who have shipped games. Our platform encodes decades of domain expertise — which player emotions predict retention, how motivations cluster into archetypes, which design decisions create unintended consequences — into infrastructure. This isn't machine learning on generic data; it's judgment shaped by experience, turned into systems that support real, high-stakes decisions.
Justin French
CEO · Product, vision & industry strategy
David Steffen
CTO · Architecture & data infrastructure
Simon Sparks
COO · People, operations & partnerships
Toby Allen
Product strategy & go-to-market
P.D.
Data science & causal inference
Andrew Gin
Data infrastructure & pipelines
Adam Merchant
Backend Engineer
Where We're BasedBrighton, UK — remote-first.
GameDataCore is founded in Brighton, UK — one of the country's most active game development hubs — and operates as a remote-first company.
Brighton's mix of independent studios, established developers, and creative technologists has shaped our perspective: pragmatic, collaborative, and grounded in real production experience.
While our team works remotely across locations, we remain closely connected to the UK and European game development ecosystem through active partnerships, pilot projects, and industry collaboration.
Our VisionThe evidence layer for the ecosystem.
To become the evidence layer that underpins game development, publishing, and investment decisions — across the entire gaming ecosystem.
Not by replacing creative judgement, but by strengthening it with clarity, context, and defensible reasoning.
Our tools are built to be used daily — for planning, discussion, alignment, and decision-making — not as a reporting layer checked after the fact.
ForInvestors
Investment memorandum, manifesto deck, and execution deck (product, traction, defensibility) are available on request.
Request investor materials →