Devhouse’s Jim Welch Can’t Get Away From the “Fun Stuff,” Part 2

A lot of overlap in writing music with writing code. That has a ton of overlap.—Jim Welch

During a Player Driven podcast last summer that featured Jim Welch, Founder and CEO of Devhouse, and Greg Posner, Founder of Player Driven, Posner asked Welch about the skills he’d learned studying music at Linfield University in Oregon in the 2000s and that he still used today.

“I think school is really great for just getting life exposure,” Welch responded, after pondering the question.

“It's just that time with your peers…School doesn't, like, super well prepare you for the job field. I'm not anti-college or anti-school because I think it prepares you for life.”

“School itself didn't do a lot to prepare me for my work” running Devhouse, Welch clarified, “but working at Funimation and being a composer and sound designer, and eventually freelance…”

In last week’s Design Desk post that introduced the exchange between Welch and Posner, and that described some of Devhouse’s recent co-dev and first-party projects, Welch’s musical background and his work on trailers for Funimation Entertainment’s anime series, Dragon Ball Z, was laid out.

“I was a freelance musician,” Welch reiterated. “That taught me a ton about how to run a business and how to, you know, get paid for your work, and what to price your work, and how to deal with clients.”

Posner asked Welch if there was a particular trailer “that stands out in your memory as the best trailer you ever saw?”

Welch thought about this question for a sec too.

“There was an Alien trailer that I remember,” he said, referring to the classic 1979 sci-fi horror movie. “They had this siren noise that they would keep cutting. A very common trope in trailers is to cut to black. But this was one of the earlier trailers that did this, like, this scary tone…[and] a lot of anxiety would fill you watching that trailer. I remember that was something we pulled from a lot.”

Ooh, yeah. If it’s this one, that trailer is definitely an oldie but a goodie.

The day Welch and Posner spoke happened to be Welch’s birthday.

Grinning, Posner thanked him for taking the time noted that Welch had already confirmed “he would not be doing 21 shots for his birthday…but he said he would like to go for a cocktail. What would be your cocktail of choice?”

An “Old Fashioned is typically” Welch’s go-to cocktail, especially if it’s on “their specialties…menu.”

And “what is the last show you binge watched?” Posner wondered.

“I wish I could binge watch The Last of Us season two, but they release it episode by episode,” he responded. “I still watch anime from time to time. I think [I’d binge] My Hero Academia. I never got into it when it came out.”

HBO’s The Last of Us season two was indeed epic (and I’m looking forward to the concluding season next year). I’m no big anime fan, but the manga series My Hero Academia looks entertaining…and I’d bet Welch could give you an excellent critique of the soundtrack!

Posner fired off another rapid-fire question.

“What did you have for breakfast?”

“I’m currently having coffee,” Welch said. “Most of the time, yeah, I don't eat breakfast. I mix, like, a protein coffee flavor with just black coffee and it adds a little bit of cream flavor.”

Yeesh!

About a month ago, Welch posted a pic of a Devhouse employee wearing a fuchsia-colored miner’s hat on LinkedIn, and wrote: “New team ritual unlocked. The bug miners! During playtests where an engineer’s feature starts to present lots of bugs we like to joke ‘Into the mines with you!’ We decided to lean into the joke and get some *official* Devhouse bug miner hats. We ready to show those bugs who’s boss.”

Grab your hardhat and a cup of (protein-laced?) coffee…or an Old Fashioned…because it’s time to get to werk!

In this concluding half of our profile of Welch and Devhouse, Design Desk will dig into some management, biz dev, and hiring best practices, and also touch on AI tools.

Diversifying and Growing Devhouse’s Revenue Streams While Avoiding Client Confusion

If you're trying to start a studio…[and] you're not a person that can have a casual conversation with somebody, if that's challenging for you, then then find someone on your team who can, because that is such an important part…I don't do, like, "salesy pitchy stuff" to people. I just talk with people.—Jim Welch

A question that Player Driven’s founder, Greg Posner, put to Jim Welch, founder/CEO of The Devhouse Agency, in their June 2025 podcast exchange involved how Welch sifted through and chose the co-dev work Devhouse would focus on next.

“We have a really wide skill set,” Welch responded, “but people don't necessarily want to dig in and figure out like, ‘Well, can you do this?’ They want to be like...‘Here's what we're looking for. Is this something that you are good at?’”

“The scary thing is,” he added, “and I found this in music too—I was a generalist in music—I think I always go for the safer, you know, wide net. But there was a lesson that was communicated in that circle as well. Like, you could be the orchestral composer or the synth composer, or whatever it might be, or you can just be a composer, and you can be hired.”

“What happens is you get a lot of the lower-end work” if you take that approach, Welch elaborated. “If you're the specialist, you might have a harder time finding the work, because there's maybe less need for a specialist in synth music or whatever it might be, but when you get it, you can charge more. It's an interesting business discovery that is always kind of in the back of your head. And you hear it. But we're having to phase it [in] more and more as the space of co-development gets more crowded.”

Posner suggested that building trust with clients and prospects had to be front and center as the company steered toward these pricier, specialized co-dev projects.

Welch nodded.

“I always,” he began, “tell my team that, like, ‘I’m not a salesperson. I came from audio and then I went to engineering. Sales was never really a part of my career path, formally.’”

“I think the reason why we've been able to sell and close work and stay in business, you know, through a pandemic and through whatever we would call what the games industry is going through now, is because I'm a pretty transparent person. I think being personable and working with people on a human level makes a difference.”

Posner circled back to the type of clients Welch targeted.

“Early on, it's whoever will hire you,” he admitted, “because you don't have the experience. You need to be flexible and willing to work with what you can get. As you grow as a company you find that smaller clients—so this is, like, less of studios, but especially individuals like entrepreneurs and business owners—smaller clients are more challenging.”

“They don't have the experience of what a project typically goes through. They are often surprised by surprises, which is common in building software especially. Whereas if you work for a larger company…[that’s] built software or who's worked with vendors, they know how it goes.”

Welch’s broad recommendation was that at “first, don't be picky. But, over time, try to work towards more organizations that ‘get it,’ like, even if it's an agency…[that] will be a reasonable partner. Try to gradually phase out…entrepreneurs and individuals.”

He elaborated on what he meant.

“If someone comes in, like, ‘I want to spend fifty thousand dollars on an app.’ As a studio our size, that's not very much, but if their entire life savings is a hundred thousand dollars, they're spending half of all they own in the world on this thing. They're going to be very emotionally attached to it. That risks problems, right? When you're trying to make decisions, business decisions with them, there's a lot of emotion involved, which makes it challenging.”

Sounds like Welch and company have taken on some entrepreneur-funded co-dev projects that went sideways…

One of the specialized areas that Devhouse has pursued over the year is virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) apps and content, as was touched on in last week’s Design Desk post.

“A year or so back we did a lot of AR/VR alongside our kind of more flat screen games,” Welch explained to Posner. “We realized that was confusing to our clients…‘Are you guys a VR studio or not?’ you know? We actually started splitting off kind of brands to cover these specific spaces that we want to keep working in.”

“Spark and Bolt is our more enterprise AR/VR immersive tech company.”

“There’ll be periods of time where we don't close work in that space and we don't focus on that space, and then we'll decide to put more focus on the space,” as attractive opportunities surface. “Now we have that language, and that brand to communicate that skill set, without muddying it with all these other things we could do.”

Posner asked how he closed business in what has been a volatile VR/AR market.

“What worked for me, and what I would recommend to anyone else doing it, is to leverage your network,” Welch responded. “I came from other studios that did similar work. I was at Groove Jones for a while, at Sector 5 for a while, and others.”

Groove Jones is a Dallas, Texas-based co-dev studio that focuses on extended reality (XR) and VR/AR apps and experiences.

Sector 5 Digital is based Fort Worth, Texas, and it builds similar types of software for Fortune 500 brands. In early 2022, Sector 5 Digital was acquired by The Glimpse Group (which has since been rebranded Brightline Interactive).

In the earliest days of what became Devhouse, Welch would reach out to “those kind of past partners, saying, ‘Hey, can I support you?’ Because I was an individual, I was very affordable. I wasn't like some big company they had to hire and subcontract, so that was able to kind of get me started.”

“I could basically say ‘Yes’ to a lot of things, and kind of shavings make a pile. Early on, I was definitely not closing big six figure deals or anything like that. It was like little projects and a bunch of them. That's kind of how I did that.”

“As far as making, you know, first hires,” Welch continued, turning to the topic of growing the team, “that is really just, for me, based on need. If you go the fundraising route, I think that's a totally different path where maybe then you plan a little more of, like, who the key players are going to be on your team, what kind of client you want. I think you do a lot more planning ahead of time. And then you pitch that to your potential investors and you start differently than bootstrapping…which is what I did.”

Posner noted that Welch must have worn a lot of hats back in those days. He pointed further back to Welch’s Funimation days, when he worked on all kinds of different, one-off music/sound projects for Dragon Ball Z and other shows.

Welch grinned and nodded.

“Every week, it would be like, ‘Here's a new show and make a new trailer for it. It'd be extremely different genres. You know, like ‘Oh, write something very similar to this Gorillaz track. Write something very similar to this John Williams track. You know, here's a Snoop Dogg song. We want to do something similar…”

Lolz.

“How does a process like that work?” Posner asked. “Do you see the video and they're just, like, ‘Hey, we want something that sounds like Snoop Dogg in this video. Go for it.’ Or…how much freedom do you have?”

“There's the typically the editor,” Welch reflected. “There was me and one other audio person on the staff at that time. We sat right across. We had our little, like, quiet offices for making audio, but right across from us were all the editors. Because Japanese marketing is so different than American marketing, it was like, ‘Hey, here's the show that we are not going to market to an American audience. Make a trailer from scratch.’ Like, ‘We’re not going to use any marketing material from Japan. We're going to make something from scratch.’”

“They would make an edit, they would do motion graphics,” he continued. “Really the editor often picks a track to edit to. It's often influenced by taste, right? Whoever that editor is, it’s like whatever’s in their mental library of music.”

“Sometimes there's a brand manager. Sometimes the brand manager says, ‘Hey, can you use this track?’ There's almost always a placeholder track that came with it. And then it's just, like, ‘Hey Jim, make something similar to this.’”

Posner nodded, but Welch could see he was still a bit mystified.

“One of my, I think, strengths, as an entrepreneur, is I just kind of dive in,” Welch said, helping Posner connect the dots.

“When I started, I wasn't like...preparing for the challenges of what could come up. I never like had that, like, ‘Here's what's going to happen’” approach.

“The sales part is something that hasn't been able to go away from my plate,” Welch added, switching gears. “I wish I could just do full creative stuff.”

Posner asked if sales wasn’t a part of the job description Welch relished.

He nodded.

“The other big thing is just learning to be a manager,” Welch added. “I played in bands. I led bands. I led groups and ensembles as a composer.”

Early in the business, I was running, you know, a team of a few people. But to be a good manager is actually, like, really nuanced and really hard. It's not just like, “Oh, be nice.” And it's not just, “Oh, get stuff done.” It's like this balancing act of how to get stuff done while being nice. It's a whole skill set that I did not prepare for and I've gradually been improving over the years, but it's an ongoing, never finished thing.

“Management is kind of special track,” agreed Posner. “You really need to understand what you're getting into.”

“You end up being out of the craft,” Welch said soberly. “That's kind of a negative thing for many people. But then the other side is, like, you just assume it's pretty straightforward, you know, and I think a lot of people who are in the trenches working, they look at their bosses [and] it's like, ‘Ahh, this joker. They don't know what they're doing.’ But it's harder than it looks.”

“I came from being a craft person and employee. And, you know, being a lead and all these different things in companies. When it's all on your shoulders, things are different. You see the decisions I've made, but you don't necessarily see the choices I have.”

“Our team, being a small team, we like generalists because it makes us agile,” Welch elaborated.

“If you're coming into a small company like mine, being a generalist is a benefit. If you want to go work for a larger studio, like a Riot or a Blizzard, you know, those companies are going to want you to be a specialist. They're going to want people at a certain caliber that being a generalist doesn't support.”

“It depends on kind of what your career interests are,” he concluded. “If you want to work on a small agile team and make kind of indie games, or work on the type of projects we do, it can be good. But as a business, we've...been super-generalists…[and] every year or two we narrow down what our specialty is.”

AI and the Ebb of AA Funding

“Gaming has a lot of moving pieces right now,” said Posner to Welch. “Are there any trends that you're noticing that you think are going to stick around?”

“This year, AI is a thing to the point where my LinkedIn feed is just inundated with AI messages,” Welch began. “I personally find it exhausting at this point. At first, it was kind of exciting, but now I'm kind of bored of hearing about it.”

Too much information: ChatGPT’s rendition of a game dev overwhelmed by AI tool info.

“That's where a lot of the money investment money has been going over the last year,” however. “I don't know how much longer that's going to keep up.”

“I think there’s an overexcitement about it,” continued Welch. “Metaverse, Web3, whatever the trend is, it has some value, but it’s not going to be…The whole industry is now AI. You know, I think it’ll be like [Adobe] Photoshop. Yeah, we use Photoshop, but some games don’t use Photoshop.”

“What excites me?” Welch asked himself. “I think the shift from big AAA budgets to, like, how we adapt to those not necessarily performing well enough, and being too big of a risk.”

“What comes out of that?” he wondered. “My assumption is we’re going to see a lot more smaller games funded, which is exciting because we’re a small team.”

“But the scary part is the competition of, like, well, maybe everyone sees that. And now everyone starts forming studios around our size. And now we're less unique.”

“For consumers,” Welch elaborated, “what you’re going to see is a lot more swings at smaller to medium sized games.”

“I think that's going to be good. I think there's still going to be the big AAA games like the Grand Theft Autos…They're going to make their money back.”

“I think community building is going to become,” he continued, “even more important than before.”

“Early days, it was like you had to get on the shelf of Walmart. And then you just had to get on the [iOS] App Store.”

Now, it's like we're buried in stuff, and a publisher can help with some marketing, but a lot of it's just community building. It's like, "Who's in your community?" "Who knows about your game?" Curation and community building are going to become more and more important.

Posner understood Welch’s point.

“We need kind of those middle-tier games to really make a strong comeback to help, I think, fix what's going on in gaming,” he said.

“When you start talking to publishers,” Welch confirmed, “they're pretty transparent about the budgets they want to work within. There's definitely a big gap. Like, there's the really massive budgets, you know, $50 million plus. And then there's the $500,000 and below for, like, the indies.”

“In between,” Welch continued, in the “$1 to $10 million [range], is a space that's traditionally been fairly hard to fill. That's just not a space a lot of investors seem to operate in on the publishing side.”

Agreed.

There’s been a bifurcation between support for massive, longstanding AAA franchises and smaller indies titles, often with unique IP, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic.

An implication of Welch’s commentary is that any backfilling of the “hollowing out of the middle” in the videogame industry will be led by indies that can find a way to grow and diversify upward into that relatively open mid-tier space. They’ll only get there, though, with the backing of avid player communities…and perhaps with an assist from AI tools that nail a “practical use…for specific things” those studios and player communities need.