Founder Story: Ben Kvalo of Midwest Games

At Gamescom this year - the largest gaming conference in the world -  Kate Kellogg was giving the keynote address. The COO of Electronic Arts, the gaming business behind Madden NFL, The Sims and FIFA amongst others, Kellogg’s talk was entitled “Lesson’s From an Unplanned Career”, and one of those lessons was ‘The time I hired a guy from Wisconsin.’

That guy from Wisconsin? The Founder of Midwest Games, Ben Kvalo.

It may just be the full-circle moment to end all full-circle moments and an appropriate way to kick off our Homecoming week. As she explained in her presentation, many years earlier she had taken a risk by bringing Ben into 2K Games despite his lack of industry experience. Against the odds, Ben turned that chance into a career at some of the biggest names in entertainment: 2K, Blizzard, Netflix. He did so whilst travelling - and living - all over the world: Los Angeles, London, Paris, Madrid, Munich and Singapore. Today, he’s back in Wisconsin, the veritable homecoming story. He’s also building Midwest Games to reimagine publishing and prove that the future of video games doesn’t have to be confined to locations like those above.

This is a founder story about how a small-town kid ended up with some of the coolest jobs in the world, and walked away from them to come back home and build something in and for the entire Midwest.

A Builder From the Start

Ben likes to joke that his first startup was all the way back in the first grade. 

He wrote a play in 2nd grade called Dogman and convinced his friends and classmates to perform it. When we start talking about his career and what he’s now building, tells me that Dog Man is actually now a popular graphic novel series for children, “So, I like to think I was innovating very very early”. It’s the middle of summer, and Ben is back at home in Wisconsin between travels. Just like in his corporate life, this is the life of a gaming publisher in one of the most global of global industries.

In college at UW–Green Bay, Ben helped launch the school’s first radio station. It wasn’t “startup-y” in the modern sense, but it sparked something: the joy of building, of making something where nothing existed previously.

Even his first paying job, teaching kids sports at age 13, planted seeds. One of those kids would later move to Los Angeles, become a writer for NBC Universal and contribute to Saturday Night Live, and even end up in Ben’s wedding party. “So you know, from the very first job... (I was) creating connections that became long-term relationships”.

But Wisconsin in the 1990s didn’t have a thriving video game industry. 

Raven Software existed in Madison, and was later acquired by Activision in 1997, but that was about it. Ben grew up playing games, even organizing tournaments, but his father wasn’t impressed. “He hated that I played video games. He would say you'll never do anything productive with video games”.

Decades later, it’s fair to say that skepticism has been firmly and unequivocally disproven.

Dreaming Beyond Wisconsin

As a kid, Ben imagined himself as General Manager of the Green Bay Packers. That dream led him to UW–Green Bay, where he majored in business and communications, hoping proximity to Lambeau Field might open those kinds of doors.

He never got that NFL job. But what he did get may have been bigger: a crash course in the business of entertainment. 

In one of his final classes, students had to create a fictional M&A deal. Ben pushed his group to pick Activision. They designed a hypothetical acquisition of gaming accessories company Mad Catz, arguing it could help to expand Activision’s flagship gaming title, Call of Duty, into the peripheral and accessories market. That project opened his eyes to the business side of the gaming industry, including publishing, licensing, strategy. “I was like, Wait a second. I haven't even thought about this as a career”.

The timing wasn’t great. He graduated during a recession, unemployed for three months, before taking a $12,000-a-year job in radio sales. “My first job was to sell air”.

For him, it was miserable. Until he spotted inefficiencies within the workplace and worked out a way to automate an eight-hour daily task down to just eight minutes. This became the hallmark of the operational instincts which would literally define the path of his career.

When he finally interviewed for a gaming job, a recruiter at 2K noticed and passed him on to the executive who would give the Gamescom keynote years later. Despite having no experience in games, he nailed his interview and two weeks later, packed up and moved to San Francisco.

The Coolest Jobs in the World

At 2K, Ben started as an operations coordinator but quickly became trusted with special projects. He designed board decks, analyzed global markets, managed middleware & game engine licensing, and helped reorganize international marketing. 

Each new challenge gave him exposure far beyond his title.

“I kind of became the special projects person. Like whatever it was, they threw me into it because I got results”.

After six years and five promotions, Blizzard recruited him to help build its esports business. He managed their annual conference, BlizzCon, oversaw tournaments, learned what worked… and what didn’t. He eventually realized that he hated esports, because, he says the industry “didn't do the homework to understand the challenges and nuances of it … it's estimated (it is) a three, five billion industry. Cool. The games industry is a $340 billion industry. So, you're talking about 1% maybe two maybe 2% on the high end… and the minute your league or whatever you're building in esports gets big enough, you get sued and get shut down by the publisher because they want to control everything. It's not a healthy industry to be in”.

He pivoted to the movie business, and joined Netflix as the first hire in marketing operations for film, leading blockbuster campaigns for Bird Box, Extraction, and more than 50 other titles.

When Netflix decided to enter gaming, they just happened to have someone with the right experience already in the building. He was one of the first ten people in their gaming operations, doing what he knew best: building systems, launching titles, and became ‘the Netflix games guy’ on LinkedIn.

From selling air in Wisconsin to shaping global entertainment. This was a run of some of the coolest jobs in the world.

Coming Back Home

In 2022, Ben returned to Green Bay for an alumni board meeting at UW–Green Bay. While touring TitletownTech - the venture firm launched by Microsoft and his beloved Packers - he pulled aside managing director Craig Dickman.

“I was like, ‘Hey, I have this idea in the back of my head. I'd love to chat about it’. Two hours later we emerged from a full whiteboard session”.

The idea? A new kind of video game publisher, rooted in the Midwest. TitletownTech committed to invest. Others soon followed.

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"if we can create change in Wisconsin, it creates change in the greater Midwest. It creates change in the US. And (that) has an outsized impact on the world”.

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By May 2023, Ben left Netflix and weeks later, he posted a screenshot on LinkedIn of his goals for the business that would become Midwest Games. It went viral: 400,000 views, 3,000 messages in a weekend and convinced him that his instincts were correct: “There’s clearly a need and a market for what I'm pitching and who I'm advocating for”, he recalls thinking.

He moved back to Wisconsin that summer. He says he spends about 75% of his time in Wisconsin, with the rest spent travelling 

back to LA and other parts of the world to conferences and to meet others in the industry. 

The reason wasn’t just personal. “I wanted… instead to touch hundreds of thousands or millions of people in a really strong way, in a really impactful way. And I look back to where I'm from and I'm like, if we can create change in Wisconsin, it creates change in the greater Midwest. It creates change in the US. And (that) has an outsized impact on the world”.

The Start of Midwest Games 

Midwest Games began as an indie publisher focused on supporting developers in the Midwest and other underrepresented places. In the first year of existence, the company published four games, ranging from the “bullet-hell” of Hive Jump 2: Survivors, made by Graphite Lab in St. Louis, Missouri, to the “coziness” of The Lullaby of Life, made by 1 Simple Game in Guadalajara, Mexico. 

Within that first year, the team was seeing how traditional publishing wasn’t really working. 

To hear them tell it, the number of games in the market is constantly increasing, with publishers taking on more risk, and overall fundraising falling. This leaves games developers with little accessible support. According to information they shared with us, only 2% of games published on the game platform Steam have the assistance of a publisher and that minority comprises the majority of revenue from players on the platform. Ben says this situation led to an a-ha moment that publishing was just…broken. 

He calls their approach ‘shadow publishing’. It is essentially a work-for-hire model where developers, media companies, and even other publishers, pay for services across marketing, production, and strategy. This for-hire model is common in other industries but surprisingly rare in games. A benefit of the model - in the company’s view - is that their clients get to keep creative control of the games, along with all future revenue and IP rights.

Next came ‘bridge publishing,’ a hybrid model for developers who bootstrap or win grants but can’t fully afford shadow publishing services. Instead of traditional publishing’s 50–60% revenue shares, a developer may grant 5-10% to Midwest Games or defer service fees until launch.

Ben admits that there are aspects of this that are an experiment. Some models will work, others won’t fit all games and clients. But the mission is clear: empower developers with flexibility and ownership, to grow sustainably and stay in the industry. That is part of the mission of the business, and it is one which appears to be an especially powerful one outside of traditional gaming hubs.

“We can provide extremely flexible support for developers, utilizing our expertise to give a game the best possible go-to-market while opening the funnel to be able to support more and more developers globally and helping them build sustainably for the long-term.”

And what about the name, Midwest Games? “It's where we're located… we see the Midwest as the starting point of that but not necessarily the end point”. 

Today, they already work with studios as far afield as India and Turkey but it’s not like it has been a walk in the park. “We've had some really tough times. We've almost run out of money three times and we found it and found it and found it. We just keep problem solving and adapting.”

The Wisconsin Thread

Throughout, Ben’s story loops back to Wisconsin. His family goes back five generations of Badgers. His great-grandmother was the one of the first women to attend  UW-Madison; his great-grandfather is a Hall-of-Fame athlete, in football, basketball, and track & field.

Even after 15 years in California, he felt the pull of home. “I've always had a strong connection to this place … even when I was gone”.

He also sees something bigger: a chance to flip the script on talent migration. “I felt like half the people I worked with (in California) were from the Midwest. They (just) couldn’t get a job in that field in the Midwest”.

His mission is to change that. “If we build more here, it's going to create pathways back. It's going to create pipelines to retain talent… many of them want to come back”.

Full Circle: Lessons for Founders

Ben’s advice to entrepreneurs reflects his journey.

1) Do as much before you raise as you can. “I was able to raise on an idea… but I was rare in that sense. Don’t rely on being an exception”.

2) Network relentlessly. From Gamescom, state to state and international travel, opportunities often come from being present. “That 1:30 a.m. conversation suddenly becomes an opportunity that becomes something else”.

3) Give more than you get. He follows what a Netflix CMO once called the ‘piggy bank philosophy’,  always putting in deposits, rarely taking withdrawals. “The goal is you’re giving back too. You’re connecting them to opportunities… we’re a connector”.

From convincing first graders to stage a play, to running global campaigns at Netflix, to building Midwest Games, Ben’s story is one of those unlikely arcs that only make sense in retrospect. 

And he’s not ready to look back yet.

And maybe that Gamescom keynote summed it up best: a reminder that sometimes it’s ‘the guy from Wisconsin’,  the one the outsiders often overlook, who  is the one who ends up actually changing the game.