Small Team, Big Ambition: How We Plan to Run OpenGames
Telegram serves over a billion people with a core engineering team of about forty. No sprawling org chart, no layers of management, no marketing department - just a small group of exceptional people shipping faster than companies a hundred times their size.
That’s not an accident. It’s a philosophy. And it’s the philosophy we’re building OpenGames on.
We’re a new B2B studio, with our first titles in production right now. Here’s how we intend to run this place - written down early, in public, so you can hold us to it.
A small team of people who are genuinely great
We believe headcount is not a measure of ambition. In many cases, it’s the opposite: every additional layer between an idea and a shipped feature slows the whole studio down.
So, we’re staying deliberately small. A compact founding team where every person owns a real, visible piece of the product - the math model, the render pipeline, the art direction, the sound. No role exists to coordinate other roles. If you join OpenGames, your work goes into the game, not into a slide deck about the game.
Small teams have a second advantage that matters even more to us: there’s nowhere to hide, and nowhere to be hidden. Your best work is seen. That’s the deal.
We hire by watching you build, not by reading your CV
Some of the best engineering organizations in the world recruit through open competitions rather than recruiter pipelines - because a weekend of real work tells you more than ten interviews.
We’re taking that seriously. Expect public game jams, engine challenges, and math puzzles from OpenGames - open to anyone, judged on the work. Do something brilliant in one of them and we will find you, not the other way around. (And yes, we quietly favour people who already love the craft: if you’ve built slot mechanics for fun, reverse-engineered a paytable out of curiosity, or shipped a PixiJS toy nobody asked for - that counts for a lot here.)
Founder-led product, zero bureaucracy
OpenGames has one product vision, held tightly. That means decisions get made in hours, not committees. It also means that when you disagree with a decision, you can argue it directly with the person who made it - usually the same day.
No status meetings that could have been a message. No process for the sake of process. We’d rather ship something weekly and be wrong fast than plan quarterly and be wrong slowly.
The product is the marketing
We don’t plan to buy attention. We plan to earn it - by showing the work as we build it: the math, the art, the code. Our Discord and Telegram aren’t “channels” managed by an agency; they’re the studio’s open workshop, run by the people actually making the games. If our titles and our craft can’t attract players, partners, and talent on their own, no ad budget will fix that.
Built to last, not built to flip
We’re building OpenGames for independence - growing on our own terms, at our own pace, answerable to the quality of the work. That means we monetize thoughtfully rather than desperately, we say no to deals that bend the studio’s direction, and we optimize for still being here - and still being good - in ten years.
The part we refuse to be casual about
Here’s where we deliberately part ways with the “move fast” crowd: compliance and player protection are not overhead to us. They’re the product.
We build games. That comes with real responsibility - certified math, honest RTP, rigorous testing, strict 18+ boundaries, and genuine respect for responsible gambling standards in every market we touch. The lean-studio playbook fails spectacularly when teams treat regulation as someone else’s problem. We’ve studied those failures closely, and we’re building the opposite: a small studio with big-studio discipline where it counts.
If that combination appeals to you - total creative freedom on the craft, total seriousness on the responsibility - you’ll fit right in.
What this means if you join us
- You’ll ship in your first weeks, not your first quarter.
- You’ll talk to the founder directly, because there’s no one in between.
- You’ll see exactly how the studio runs, because we work in the open.
- You’ll be one of a handful of people a lot of players will eventually thank - even if they never learn your name.
- And you’ll help set the standards, because founding team means exactly that.