The Business of Games
The Business of Games: A podcast for developers, publishers, and executives navigating the ever-changing game industry.
From monetization models to player behavior, from platform shifts to emerging markets, The Business of Games is your guide to all the things transforming how games are built, marketed, and scaled.
Hosted by Chris Hewish and Lia Ballentine, each episode blends strategic insight, cinematic storytelling, and candid conversations with the people driving the business of play. You’ll hear from top executives inside studios and strategic partners across the ecosystem who are uncovering the ideas, tactics, and trends shaping tomorrow’s opportunities.
Whether you’re launching your first game or scaling a global studio, you’ll find practical strategies, future-forward thinking, and real-world examples you can act on right away.
The Business of Games is brought to you by Xsolla, your strategic partner behind the scenes. We bring together “All the Things” to help you simplify operations, unlock new revenue, reach more players, and launch fast.
Visit xsolla.com to learn more, connect with our team, and access all the things you need to level up your business of play. Want to join the conversation? Follow and comment on our LinkedIn page at The Business of Games Podcast, where we’ll be sharing updates, highlights, and continuing the discussion. And don’t forget to subscribe, rate, review, and share the podcast with friends and colleagues who want to learn more about the business of games.
The Business of Games
From gas stations to game studios: Rob Carroll on community, Roll Craft, and the comeback of text-based RPGs
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Welcome to Coffee.Press.Play., brought to you by The Business of Games Podcast, powered by Xsolla. Recorded live at GDC 2026 inside the Xsolla Clubhouse, this series puts a twist on the traditional interview format: guests play a round of a classic video game against our Xsolla host and the outcome determines whether they face an easy question or a hard one.
In this episode, host Ed Lin sits down with Rob Carroll, CEO and co-founder of Roll Craft — a studio on a mission to bring back the text-based RPG experiences that defined Facebook gaming's golden era.
Rob's path into games is one of the more unexpected ones you'll hear. He was a construction manager building gas stations in Boston when a gaming community pulled him west. A guild for the modded shooter Tribes, an angel investor who happened to be playing, and a project management role that needed filling — that's how a career in construction became a career in games. From there, Rob went on to LucasArts, Zynga (where he worked on the Mafia Wars franchise), and Wargaming, where he helped launch World of Tanks Blitz on mobile. Now, he's taken the leap into founding his own studio.
Roll Craft is building an HTML5 platform for text-based RPG games, the kind that thrived on Facebook before the platform moved on. Rob believes that genre still has a real home in today's market — and he's betting his next chapter on proving it.
What you'll hear:
- How a Tribes guild mod and an angel investor launched Rob's career in games
- Why he believes text-based RPGs have a strong place in today's market
- What it actually felt like to go from the corporate side of the industry to founding a studio
- How Roll Craft is using WeFunder to raise community-backed equity funding
- The one piece of advice Rob would give anyone stepping into the founder seat
Let's get into it.
Coffee.Press.Play. is an ongoing mini-series, and more conversations with our GDC guests are on the way. Listen on your favorite podcast platform or watch full episodes on our YouTube channel.
Missed us at GDC 2026? Stay tuned to our LinkedIn page for announcements on where we'll be next. And catch up on recent episodes at xsolla.com/podcast.
For more insights and resources, visit xsolla.com/podcast. Want to join the conversation? Follow and comment on our LinkedIn page at The Business of Games Podcast. That’s where we’ll be sharing updates, highlights, and continuing the discussion. And don’t forget to subscribe, rate, review, and share the podcast with friends who want to learn more about the business of games.
