we are
about making the best games ...
We want to make the best mobile games available on the Apple App Store and Google Play. Not just in Vancouver or Canada, where we started our company in 2006, we want to be the best in the world. Period. We create the concepts, develop the best games, and publish them. We want to lead the way with our destiny in our hands. Welcome to our world.

top 100

 We are one of the top 100 mobile game developers in the world.

Number 1

 Our games have reached #1 on the App Store & Google Play charts in over 60 countries.

Over 1/4 Billion

 Our mobile games have been downloaded by millions of gamers from all over the world.
Meet our leadership team

Ian Wilkinson

CEO

Vlad Ceraldi

Director of Development

Robert Sparks

Director of Technology

Mike Inglehart

Creative Director

Oliver Birch

Director of Marketing

Shelley Bubb

VP Finance

Cathy Lim

HR Director

Ian Wilkinson, CEO

"Persevere. Always mutate and adapt. Like cockroaches."

Ian co-founded Radical Entertainment, Canada’s largest independent game company, in 1991. He sold the company to Vivendi Games in 2006, and retired as CEO and President in 2008. Ian joined Hothead the following year, steering the company toward record profitability and honing the company vision in the mobile game space. Ian sat on the advisory boards of the BC Institute of Technology and the BC Advanced Systems Institute, and was Chair of New Media BC. He is a winner of Ernst and Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year Award and a graduate of the Ivey Business School at Western University.

Vlad Ceraldi, Director of Development

"Our formula is simple: hire the best talent, craft world-class teams, create amazing games."

Vlad has 20 years of experience building and leading teams to deliver top-performing games. Co-Founder of Hothead Games and formerly President and CEO, Vlad was instrumental in the company’s 2011 transition from console to mobile. He has since returned to his true love, overseeing game production. In his career, he has held a diverse range of roles from Lead Programmer and Exec Producer to his current position giving him the ability to approach development from a technical, production and business points of view. Vlad is a former Business in Vancouver Forty Under 40 Winner and a graduate of the Royal Military College of Canada. Occasionally, he makes us salute him.

Robert Sparks, Director of Technology

Robert has 20 years of experience in the video game industry and has been with Hothead since 2008. He focuses on solving technical challenges to support the creative iteration necessary to make great games. Hothead’s diverse technical landscape includes game engines, server-supported online features, and data and machine learning systems. Robert's previous experience includes working for Radical Entertainment where he was a member of the Advanced Technology Group and a Technical Lead. He holds a Bachelor of Software Engineering from the University of Victoria.

Mike Inglehart, Creative Director

"You're only as good as your next game!"

A veteran of the games industry for 16 years in the discipline of game design, Mike created the original concept for the Big Win Sports series and produced the first five Big Win games. He is now responsible for the creative vision of all Hothead products. As game director at Next Level Games, Mike shipped highly successful products for Nintendo and other large international publishers. Before that he was a line producer at Electronic Arts and a lead designer at Radical. A long-suffering Buffalo Bills and Sabres fan, Mike has great taste in everything except sports teams.

Oliver Birch, Director of Marketing

"The fans are massively important, we would be nothing without them."

Oliver brings 17 years of marketing experience to his role, seven of those focused on games. He has worked with top software publishers and developers in North America and Europe; managed advertising network, media agency, creative supplier and platform relationships; and brought new mobile, console and PC products to market with chart-topping success. Before joining Hothead, Oliver set up and managed an agency that marketed downloadable games for global clients including EA, SEGA, and Paramount Digital Entertainment. He says he’s from England, but we’re pretty sure he’s making that accent up.

Shelley Bubb, VP Finance

Shelley is a CPA, CA who brings over 18 years of finance experience to her role as VP Finance of Hothead Games, including significant experience in financial reporting and controls and helping growing companies. Prior to joining Hothead, Shelley was the Senior Director of Finance at quantum computing company D-Wave Systems Inc. and has also held senior finance positions in publicly listed mining companies and was an audit manager at PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Cathy Lim, HR Director

"If you love your job and the people you work with, that's most of your life that is spent being happy!"

As a seasoned HR veteran in the tech industry, Cathy brings over 15 years of HR and recruitment experience to Hothead. She has worked for some of Vancouver’s largest technology companies and also helped grow VFX and indie game studios prior. Cathy’s passion and talent for hiring, onboarding and developing people with red-carpet service is what makes her unique. Her goal is to improve employee engagement, build a solid HR foundation, and help Hothead become one of Canada’s 50 Best Workplaces.

our story all about hothead

As one of Canada’s largest independent mobile games studios, Hothead Games is also recognized as one of BC’s Best Workplaces and one of Canada’s Top Technology Workplaces. The key to our success comes from hiring smart and talented people to help make magic happen in our studio! We create the concepts, we develop and publish the games, and we build communities around the players.

Our excellent team is just one of the reasons for our success; as a company, we focus on and take pride in:

★ Investing in technology. With our proprietary game engine, building our Unity expertise, our proprietary analytics stack and a dedicated central tech team, we have some of the best programmers and data scientists in the industry.

★ All of our production, publishing, marketing, and customer support is orchestrated in-house, from audio to QA, community support to DevOps. We offer full-cycle, product-to-market mobile games which sets us apart from most developers.

★ Developing a continuous learning culture. Our weekly Lunch & Learns are always a hit. Employees at every level from each department take turns to present project updates, share their knowledge, celebrate successes and announce company updates.

★ Getting feedback. HR conducts 1-1’s with each employee semi-annually, and all employees have 1-1’s with their leads monthly or more. We are immensely proud of our 86% overall employee engagement score based on our external engagement survey results.

★ Embracing diversity. Our commitment to diversity and inclusion is critical to our success. We encourage different perspectives and believe we are made stronger by our unique combination of culture, race, ethnicity, age, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, physical or mental ability, and work-life situations.

★ Giving back. We are proud of our Charity Committee that plans events, auctions, and fundraisers. Some of the charities we support include the Greater Vancouver Foodbank, Union Gospel Mission, Habitat for Humanity, and the Canadian Mental Health Association.

At Hothead Games, we encourage autonomy and creative freedom, and together we define our destiny. Welcome to our world!

Transparent We involve all company employees in our revenue performances for our games.
75 terabytes Our players generate over 75 terabytes of data on our servers - that is a lot of number crunching.