The Man Who Advises on Gaming’s Biggest Deals
Affan Butt’s co-founded Aream & Co., an investment bank that has advised on over 110 gaming deals worth an astonishing $40 billion to date. Affan has sat on the founder's side of the table, negotiating with every kind of buyer on their behalf. So I asked him what a founder should know before selling today.
Listen to the full conversation on Deconstructor of Fun
Affan Butt was walking down London’s Regent Street with Akin Babaygit, who was talking about the latest rocket ship out of Istanbul. Astonishing metrics, raising money. Affan asked why they were raising instead of selling. The argument was simple: nobody can see around the corner in hybridcasual, and if it gets big enough, you end up selling to the Saudis or the Chinese anyway. So why not have that conversation now, with structure, while the chart is still vertical?
The company was Loom Games. Four months old, fewer than a dozen people, one promising game nobody could forecast six months out. Affan's firm sold it to Saudi-owned Scopely for over a billion dollars.
That firm is Aream & Co, which he set up in 2019 with Kartik Parbhakara. Over 110 transactions in seven years, $40 billion in value, more than half of all $100M-plus sell-side deals in gaming over the last five years. He sits on the founder’s side of the table and negotiates with every kind of buyer on their behalf. So I asked him what a founder should know before selling today.
HOW DEALS START YEARS BEFORE THE DEAL
The secret to being successful is that you mostly just have to be liked.
"In 2012, I reached out to Ilkka Paananen (CEO and co-founder of Supercell) on LinkedIn. I said, hey, I just want to come hang out. And for some reason, he said Sure."
Affan flew to Helsinki and spent almost the entire day with Ilkka and Petteri, then Supercell's president of the board and a legendary venture capitalist today. He pitched nothing. Hay Day had just launched, Clash was still coming, and Sensor Tower did not exist yet, so there was no data to be clever with.
Same pattern in Istanbul, where he showed up at the Sidar's (founder of Peak) office in 2012 when there were four people in it. Plenty of those trips went nowhere. If he knew ten years out who the unicorns would be, he says, he would be investing instead of advising.
BEHIND THE CURTAIN
What happens in between comes down to preparation and psychology.
The formal M&A process runs roughly six months from first outreach to close. Yet it’s the relationship work that makes the formal process possibly take years and happens before the clock starts. This is also why Affan treats inbound corporate development interest from founders with suspicion. Founders tend to read a warm email from a big company as validation when it’s, in reality, part of a corporate development professional’s job description.
On preparation, he told a story with the name removed. They pitched, agreed on valuation, buyer list, timeline, and fees, and signed. One week later, at the due diligence kickoff meeting, the founders lowered their own projections by twenty-five percent. The trust was lost, and the deal crashed.
WHEN FOMO BACKFIRES
The pool of acquirers is also smaller today than it used to be, which is why a bidding war can backfire.
On FOMO, he refused the flattering answer. "We would love to think we (bankers) are magicians, but the reality is that it is the game and the team that creates the real FOMO." What the banker adds is credibility that something is actionable.
The pool of acquirers is also smaller today than it used to be, and not for commercial reasons. Geopolitics removes buyers before price is ever discussed, usually with no formal ruling anywhere. It is just understood.
The part founders find hardest to believe: on Loom, there were better offers on day one. The founders took Scopely anyway. "If somebody says, ' Here is a hundred million bucks, that is a lot of money, and it is more than sixty. If it does not work out, who cares? I have a hundred million. But that is not how it works. For founders, it is their company. It is their baby."
Which is why a bidding war can backfire. Blasting a teaser to everyone with an email account after telling a buyer you were running a quiet process is how a small industry stops trusting you. The cost lands in the three-month gap between signing and closing, when something always goes sideways.
"If you have come across as transactional, and the only thing you cared about was the last penny, then when anything goes sideways, the buyer says, ' Actually, I want some of that money back. Versus saying, we signed a deal, do not worry; let us sort this out together. Everybody equally happy or equally unhappy is the right deal."
Counterintuitively, Affan also tells founders not to sell more often than you would expect, usually because he knows the buyer landscape has no market for that profile right now. Some founders take another opinion from another banker and hit the market anyway. His argument is that no one is free.
"Why do you want to get twenty no’s when I have high conviction it is going to be a no? It goes in the acquirers’ database. They looked at it and said no. Next time, the bar is just much higher."
SELL, SOME, AND KEEP BUILDING
The most expensive mistake is not a bad deal. It is a missed one.
"The vast majority of regrets are the ones that did not happen. Theoretically, tomorrow you are always going to be more valuable than today. But that is theoretical, and that is on Excel, and that is in a world where nothing is changing."
The alternative is taking money off the table, referred to as “secondaries,” where investors buy shares from founders and employees.
His reference case is the Supercell 2013 secondary, where everyone from founders to support function sold sixteen percent of their stock and vested options. The investors’ fear was that people would get rich and stop working. The opposite happened.
Despite the evidence, appetite for secondaries varies by geography. "As you go east, it becomes more of a question mark." Turkish founders often read a secondary as a loyalty test, fearing that selling is seen as a lack of commitment. Israeli founders, on the other hand, expect it in every fundraise.
WHERE FOUNDERS GET WRECKED
As you have to reach into the drawer for the contract you signed, that means shit has happened. And it’s too late.
Then there are the deals you make.
Buyers are solving it inside the deal. The pitch is “life-changing money on day one, keep running the company inside guardrails, keep the upside”. That is also a large part of why studios are selling younger. In addition to the IPO route in gaming effectively being closed due to an abysmal cohort of 2020-22 listings.
Which brings us to earnouts. A well-built one is an alignment tool instead of a trap.
The self-inflicted version starts in the pitch deck, which is again why Affan pushes on preparation and “the boring stuff”. The classic misalignment is an EBITDA-based earnout in the final year. The buyer wants to launch your new titles. You do not, because launch costs eat the number your payout depends on. Nobody is acting in bad faith. The document is simply pointed the wrong way.
Finnish ReWorks, which was acquired by Playtika for 600M, is the case I keep coming back to. The game engine was changed after the acquisition, performance collapsed, and the founders were measured on something they no longer controlled.
THE BUYERS
The buyer universe has changed a lot, because a lot of the buyers themselves have been bought.
The Zyngas are gone. The Nordic roll-ups that used to absorb everything are no longer buying.
What remains is the public strategics (ex., Savvy), large private strategics (ex., Tencent) with real balance sheets like Moon Active and Tripledot Studios, Private Equity (ex., CVC), and newer mid-cap entrants including Korean buyers and Indian Nazara. Above a certain size, the list collapses almost entirely. "I was not really half-joking. You end up with the Saudis or the Chinese."
When I asked what these different acquirers secretly obsess over, he rejected the premise.
Nothing is secret. The real friction is that founders are creatives being asked to underwrite legal machinery they have never seen. Escrows, indemnities, liability caps. "That is the stuff where they look at it and think, ' What the hell is all this? They are just LLMing it all." What wrecks founders is boring paperwork nobody prepared them for, negotiated at the point of maximum exhaustion.
The private equity (PE) playbook works in gaming, selectively. Jagex works. Twenty-five years old, long cohorts, IP that extends into transmedia, costs to cut in one place and lines to grow in another. A recognizable PE asset that happens to make games, and it has grown since CVC and Haveli took it. Dream Games is the opposite. "That is a select group of people handcrafting beautiful games. It is not a fixer. That is why it is a minority deal, and normally PE is looking for control."
Sovereign money is its own category. No LPs, no fund life, no pressure to exit on anyone else’s schedule, and acquisitions that continue through crises that would freeze a normal buyer.
The end state is unclear, including to him. "You are not buying EA just to buy EA. I would imagine you want to build out more on top of that. And then what do you do with a business worth a hundred billion?"
WHAT I TOOK FROM IT ALL
There’s no vantage point like the one Affan has. He has been in a room where deals were made 110 times and seen hundreds of deals that never crossed the finish line.
The asymmetry is the story. A founder sells a company once, maybe twice in a lifetime. Every structural advantage on the other side of the table comes from repetition, and the founder walks in with none of it. The self-evident part is the argument for hiring a banker to advise you.
The ugly part is today’s shallow buyer pool. Half the acquirers who defined the decade have themselves been acquired, the IPO window in gaming is shut, and above a certain valuation the list of people who can write the check fits on one hand and carries a passport most founders had not considered.
And then there’s the beautiful part. The gaming founder of today builds their “last company”. Not studios that fit a VC narrative. Not something around unsustainable growth or an AI narrative, but a studio they want to see running for the rest of their lives. And you know what, those are the ones Affan is already flying to spend a day with. They are not for sale, which makes them that much more desirable…
