Dev to Dev S03 E02 - Jay Powell

This week's episode is one of my favorites so far, and it's not because Jay Powell has some big design philosophy to unpack — it's because he doesn't. He told me straight up: "I would never claim to be a world-class game designer." What he's spent thirty years building instead is something almost nobody talks about: the ability to sit between two people who don't understand each other and make a deal happen anyway.

Jay started as an English Literature major with zero interest in games as a career — the games industry basically didn't exist as a career when he was in college. He fell into it through a beer-money job testing games, and from there built one doing things nobody had a manual for: inventing contracts one country at a time before digital distribution existed, translating for movie studios and museums who had no idea how games worked, and eventually running scouting for publishers who couldn't articulate what they actually wanted.

He also told me one of the most honest burnout stories I've heard on this podcast — an ulcer, throwing up blood at 4am, and quitting on the spot the day a manager told him to just stay quiet behind a closed door during layoffs. If you've ever felt like this industry asks too much of the people who love it most, this one's going to hit.

Highlights:

• The floating cube that sold an entire publishing deal — no playable demo required
• How one careless word nearly got him in real trouble with the Smithsonian
• Why Nickelodeon's character bible for Dora the Explorer remains the gold standard of licensing paperwork
• The exact moment — mid-ulcer, told to hide during layoffs — he quit with no plan
• Why every young developer needs to understand "the Hollow Knight problem" before picking a genre

Go give this one a listen — it's a masterclass in staying indispensable to an industry for thirty years without ever writing a line of code.

Find the Podcast at:

• Spotify
• Patreon
• ⁠RSS⁠
• ⁠Instagram⁠
• ⁠Bluesky⁠
• ⁠YouTube⁠
• ⁠Blog⁠
• Newsletter
• Email: DevToDevPodcast@Gmail.com

Find Jay At: 

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaypowell/
• https://powellgroupconsulting.com/
• https://indiegamebusiness.com/category/podcast/