BVB Arena: Amber and the bumpy road from a bunch of programmers to an international group of gaming studios
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…
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.
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.
"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 Mihai Pohonțu, Co-founder of AMBER.
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.
Company identity
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.
"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.
Secrets of success
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.
