BVB Arena: AMBER and the bumpy road from a bunch of programmers to an international group of gaming studios
<h3>This article series tells the stories of the 15 finalists selected in the Made in Romania 2023 program. Made in Romania is the flagship program of the Bucharest Stock Exchange dedicated to the development and promotion of the Romanian entrepreneurial environment. The program’s goal is to select and promote Romanian companies that have the greatest growth potential and high chances of becoming impactful players in the local and even regional economy. As of 2024, the Made in Romania program has been rebranded BVB Arena.</h3>

<p>AMBER was founded in 2013 and the initial idea was to create a group of programmers to deliver development solutions for the gaming industry. In just ten years, it has grown into one of the biggest players in the local gaming industry and expanded internationally, with studios in Kyiv, Warsaw, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Montreal, Guadalajara, and Manila.</p>

<p>"We saw that game studios needed support services to complete projects on time, and thus, a scalable, high-quality solution would be welcome in the market. We started with an elite group of programmers but soon noticed that other related solutions were desired by our partners, such as art, design, testing, and others. This allowed us to rapidly develop in all disciplines of game creation. The next step was to assemble all these specialties in creative studios and produce games", recalls <strong>Mihai Pohonțu, Co-founder of AMBER</strong>.</p>

<p>In 2022, AMBER achieved revenues of USD 45 million, after 50% annual growth in the last 5 years, EBITDA of +15%, and 1,200 employees, becoming an important presence in the global gaming industry.</p>

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<p><strong>Company identity</strong></p>

<p>The company's vision is to be a reference solution for creative industries. AMBER has a community of professionals who deliver positive impact for partners, for the game developer community in each location where it is present, and in the wider society. AMBER team values ​​include teamwork, play, education, kaizen, performance, humanity and community.</p>

<p>"If I were starting a new business today, I would invest more energy from the very beginning in clarifying the company's values ​​and setting the culture we want to build. The mistake I made in the beginning was to communicate the ideology of the company without consulting the extended team, only to return to the culture once the company had already reached a large size of hundreds of people. The respective effort to set the culture proved much more complex, and led to the loss of two key people from the management team", says Mihai Pohonțu.</p>

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<p><strong>Secrets of success</strong></p>

<p>By 2017, AMBER had grown to over 200 people, diversified into several services, and even experimented with full game development. The company was also in the throes of an existential crisis as a unique confluence of factors threatened its existence. That year, Disney decided to pull back from game development, focusing on licensing, and within 6 months, revenue from that account had dropped from over USD 300,000 per month, nearly 75% of the company's total revenue at that time, to zero.</p>

<p>"At that time, we decided to invest heavily in building our first free-to-play game, Rumble Heroes. This was meant to prove to the industry that we could handle a real-time multiplayer game with a complex back-end, with 3D graphics and reflecting the monetization design of one of the most successful titles on the market at the time. Due to our lack of experience, we unfortunately underestimated the effort required to bring such a game to market. We made some unforced errors in content and technology, which caused skyrocketing expenses. The project was losing money, and to compound our problems, there were also differences of opinion within the team about the direction of the project. The cherry on top was that, at that time, the US wanted to revitalize its struggling industrial sector by devaluing the dollar. Since most of our clients were in the US, but local salaries were tied to the euro, the currency exchange further reduced our finances by 15%," explains Mihai Pohonțu, Co-Founder of AMBER.</p>

<p>This was the "perfect storm" for AMBER. The company's reserves went down by USD 100,000 in every quarter of 2017, and it was clear that continuing on this path, the company would run out of cash and no longer be able to pay wages.</p>

<p>"This was our time to show strength and thrive in adversity and we did. We couldn't afford to hire a business development team, so our head of product development, Scott Humphries, and I had a dual role: attending conferences and leading the sales process. We took a long, hard look at Rumble Heroes and decided it was worth pursuing the project through, despite the unclear commercial potential and current development challenges. We knew it was vital to prove our ability to create great products in the free-to-play mobile space, which was the dominant business model on that platform. We committed to the idea that we would learn how to develop this kind of complex effort. After much trouble and two different publishers, we ultimately failed to achieve commercial success, but the game proved pivotal for us, providing additional contract work for the full development of the game, which ultimately secured our success in the following years", says the Romanian entrepreneur.</p>

<p>The company's situation began to improve towards the end of 2017, but that year turned out to be a financial disaster. AMBER lost USD 1.5 million on USD 5 million in revenues, but the entrepreneur managed to keep the company afloat, and after a few months of using his bank overdraft to pay wages, he saw that the financial situation was constantly improving.</p>

<p>"It stabilized in 2018 when we grew revenue to USD 7.5 million and were marginally profitable, followed by great years since then. Looking back at that moment, I would say that we came out stronger and more resilient from the overall experience, with a new sense of confidence in our ability to manage our own destiny", recalls the AMBER Co-Founder.</p>

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<p><strong>Future plans</strong></p>

<p>In the short term, the plan is to strengthen the company's presence in the market by acquiring and establishing new studios. In the long term, the AMBER team aims to create outstanding games with commercial success worldwide and actively prepare for the integration of AI technologies in the production process.</p>

<p>"At the moment, we have teams in Romania, Ukraine, Canada, the US, Mexico, and the Philippines, and our clients are in the US, Canada, and Western Europe. In the long term we want to expand the activity in South America and Asia", says Mihai Pohonțu.</p>

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<p><strong>What does it mean to be a “Made in Romania” brand</strong></p>

<p>The gaming industry in Romania is still emerging, although it has a considerable history due to the presence of multinational studios such as Ubisoft, Gameloft, and EA. According to the entrepreneur, aligning with global standards requires an extensive ecosystem of independent studios that show the ability to produce commercial successes.</p>

<p>"Personally, I believe it’s an advantage to be a Romanian brand, thanks to local talents. We are honored to be part of this program, which represents the most successful stories from local entrepreneurship", concludes Mihai Pohonțu, Co-founder of AMBER.</p>

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<p><em>*The Romanian version of this article was published in the Made in Romania 2023 booklet, which gathers the stories of the 15 finalist companies selected last year in the Made in Romania program. A new edition of the program, now branded BVB Arena, started in April 2024.&nbsp;<a href="https://www.bvbarena.ro/">More details about the program are available here</a>.</em></p>