BLACKBAY
I’m Kim Kupiainen, a Senior Game Producer helping studios realign leadership, teams, and publishers around the same reality.
I help founders and studio leads fix expectation drift*
The gap between what leadership thinks is happening and what teams, platforms, and publishers can actually
deliver. Hands-on senior production to realign goals, pipelines, LiveOps, and communication before it gets
expensive.
Game production consulting • VR games • Mobile F2P & LiveOps • PC & Console launches • Publisher & platform alignment
About
I’ve led teams & companies through launches, rescues, and long-tail LiveOps while keeping players, partners, and teams in the loop.
My work sits between leadership, teams, and publishers: making sure everyone is taking part in discussions in a shared reality, not their own pitch decks. That usually leads to clearer decision ownership, honest scopes, and a roadmap that people can actually deliver.
If your project feels noisy, political, or stuck in “pulling heroics mode”, that’s usually a sign of expectation drift. That’s where I help as a hands-on production specialist for hire.
Selected collaborations – production leadership, LiveOps, and publisher alignment for games.
Meta Quest submissions, console TRC/VRC, and mobile store requirements. I align what leadership wants to
ship with what the team can realistically deliver and what platforms actually expect.
The result: predictable launches instead of heroic last-minute saves.
When LiveOps feels chaotic, the roadmap, capacity, and goals are out of sync. I untangle priorities, clarify
trade-offs, and reconnect LiveOps plans with reality, so updates for your live game land on time and with
less stress.
Stability first. Then sustainable growth.
Lightweight systems for senior teams: clear decision owners, risk maps, clean boards, and recurring partner syncs that actually surface misalignment early. Enough structure to prevent drift; not enough to slow you down.
Helping studios and publishers get back on the same page: shared language for scope, quality, and timelines, realistic milestone framing, and visibility into what has been delivered versus what’s still ahead.
Aligning business expectations with player reality: pricing experiments, pass structures, and sinks/sources mapping that are grounded in data and respectful of your audience, instead of short-term panic moves.
1:1 and small-group coaching for leads and producers who are stuck in the gap between “what was promised” and “what’s possible”. Practical tools for setting expectations, saying no, and protecting teams from constant crisis mode.
F2P & LiveOps: Multi-year production leadership on BOOM KARTS & Critical Ops, bringing leadership, design, monetization, and community expectations back into alignment while stabilising feature delivery, ad stack health, and LiveOps cadence.
VR Launch Readiness: Led Meta Quest QA cycles and VRC fixes while realigning publisher expectations, internal scope, and platform requirements to ensure builds were actually ready for submission.
Team Health & Delivery: Revitalised underperforming teams by clarifying ownership, tightening feedback loops, and adjusting scope, leading to up to 5× content output and roughly 20% faster delivery without burning people out.
Analytics & Decision Loops: Connected product, UA, and economy data (BigQuery/Firebase) so leadership, design, and LiveOps were finally arguing from the same reality instead of competing dashboards.
Who do you usually work with?
Founders, studio heads, executive producers, and lead producers who feel a gap between plans and reality: slipping milestones, strained publisher calls, or teams stuck in constant fire-fighting.
Do you work under NDA?
Yes. Most engagements are NDA-bound; I share only sanitised learnings, frameworks, and tools.
Time zones & availability?
Europe/Helsinki (EET). Remote-first, with overlapping US/EU hours when needed. I typically take on only a small number of parallel engagements to stay hands-on.
Tech & platforms?
Unity, Unreal Engine, Godot, and GameMaker pipelines; Meta Quest; iOS/Android; Steam and console submissions; analytics via BigQuery/Firebase.
How do we start?
Book a meeting and give me a short brief about where you feel expectations and reality are out of sync. I’ll suggest a scoped alignment sprint (often 2–3 weeks) with clear outcomes, timelines, and decision points, so you know exactly what we’re tackling.
If you suspect your internal picture of the project doesn’t match reality, with launches slipping, LiveOps stalling, or publisher calls getting tense, it’s a good time to talk. I help you get everyone back on the same page and moving forward with clear, honest production.