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Headline lessons
Metacore’s foundation was built on Everywear Games. Mika and his co-founder Aki started it in December 2014, right after Apple announced the first Apple Watch, because they believed games are often among the first killer apps on a new platform. They raised money, built a team, and shipped four Apple Watch games, building an early fanbase for that niche.
The hard lesson learned through Everywear was mainly about market size. They became the most successful smartwatch game developer out there but still did not have a market big enough to win in. The ceiling of the market was crucial for ambition. Even if the product worked, smartwatch games could not support the scale they wanted to build toward.
That mismatch pushed Mika into a more reflective “what have I learned?” mode. He used his learnings from the journey with Everywear to rethink what direction the company needed to move into, and what type of arena the next one would be.
By 2018, the smartwatch chapter had forced a clearer view of what had actually gone wrong. Mika realized he had internalized “blue ocean” thinking as “avoid competition,” and that this bias made him overvalue arenas with little competitive pressure even when the demand was not there at the scale they needed. In hindsight, the absence of competition was not a moat. It was often a sign that the market itself was not real yet.
From there, he flipped the lens. In mobile games the competition was intense, but Mika started seeing competition as something that “defines the market.” What mattered more than the number of incumbents was whether the industry was still immature and changing. If it was, then the category would keep evolving, and a new company could still win by building toward what the mature version should look like.
That immaturity lens also shaped how they thought about games as a category. Mika realised that one of the clearest signs of immaturity in a market is when creators build mainly from their own intrinsic motivations instead of deeply understanding a specific audience. For Metacore, choosing the arena meant choosing to compete in a market they believed was real and growing, and to build with an audience-first thesis that many teams still lacked.
The pivot from Everywear to Metacore was not a clean slide. Pivots are a disruptive process because the vision changes and the skill requirements to fulfil vision change with it. Some people do not buy the new direction, and the company has to rebuild around what the next game actually demands.
When transitioning into mobile, they realised the core risk was that the industry still lacked clarity about audiences. Studios were building for their own taste and the category lacked vocabulary and shared understanding for talking about audiences properly. For Metacore, the early job was to create that clarity before sinking time into mechanics.
That is why their validation approach started with concepts rather than prototypes. Mika’s logic was simple: if you do not understand the audience, you cannot meaningfully prototype for them. So they began by testing story-driven premises and building a language that matched the audience they wanted to reach, and only moved toward deeper building once those early signals were there. He notes that today you could create and iterate these kinds of story premises much faster with modern tools, which makes the signal-seeking loop even quicker.
They also carried over one hard product thesis from smartwatch. Short sessions taught them that moment-to-moment gameplay is not enough if the experience does not stay with the player. The game has to “live in your head” between sessions, and in that setup the meta becomes more important than the core. That insight became a deliberate design direction as they moved into mobile.
Instead of building a full prototype upfront, they ran a sequence of small tests, increasing fidelity only when the market reaction justified it. Mika’s view on this was that teams often postpone testing until late, and once they are close to launch they get nervous and start explaining away bad signals with “a million different excuses.” Their answer was to force external reactions early, before the team had time to rationalise.
One early step was concept testing through PlaytestCloud, where they saw strong results which gave them the signal to justify building the next step. They then built the smallest playable test they could, a version with only one session of content. They tested it again through PlaytestCloud, watched videos of players playing, listened to reactions, and collected scores and written feedback. When those signals stayed positive, they expanded the playable toward “a couple of days” of content.