Spotlight on Brunette Games

Lisa Brunette
Owner and Chief Creative Officer
www.brunettegames.com
lisa@brunettegames.com

Summation of Business:

Brunette Games LLC is the game industry’s leading storytelling studio. We have designed and written narratives for multiple chart-topping mobile games played by worldwide audiences in the billions, including Merge Mansion, Matchington Mansion, and Choices: Veil of Secrets. Our games have been featured in the App Store and on Google Play and consistently rank in the top 20 in multiple categories. Founder Lisa Brunette has been named a game-industry influencer and is widely regarded as an expert in the field. Brunette Games is the go-to creative resource for interactive storytelling.

Describe any upcoming events, promotions, or anniversaries for your business:

We passed the six-year mark this spring, giving me the opportunity to reflect on how far we’ve come from my first forays as a “solopreneur” back in 2016. It was a big step to leave a senior position at a large game publisher in Seattle, and now here I am, with my own team, and back in my hometown, too. Over the past two years, we grew our staff by 40 percent! With that growth has come key promotions, with my No. 3 hire, Dexter Woltman, earning the title of Writer | Designer III this spring, and Jenna Hume and Sara Hardin both promoted to Writer | Designer II. 

What is the most exciting thing to recently happen for your business or in your industry?   

The game industry is quickly embracing the subscription model, which means instead of paying for the game as you play through small transactions (such as buying boosters to aid your success in a match-3 puzzle), you get the game as part of a set subscription fee that gives you access to a whole library of games. We already have one Netflix Game to our credit and are working on another. We’re also working on a project for Apple Arcade. After years of perfecting the free-to-play model for mobile games, we’re thrilled to try a new structure that is both “new” and actually quite classic at the same time.

Chamber Talk 

What does chamber membership mean for you and your business?

The Chamber of Commerce is vital to our success at Brunette Games. At a basic level, we depend on the Chamber for group access to quality health insurance for our entire staff of five full-time employees. We also regularly lease meeting space from the Chamber, which is a great resource for our team of home-office workers. While our clients are mostly outside St. Louis and we don’t really need to network or market our services locally, we find a personal point of pride in supporting the many Maplewood businesses that are also part of the Chamber. My husband, Anthony, is a key part of Brunette Games, and he and I live and work in Maplewood. We’ve got to know fellow small-business owners and consider ourselves Maplewood boosters!

What is your favorite Maplewood or Richmond Heights Chamber business?

It’s so hard to pick a favorite, and often we’ll find that weeks have gone by and we haven’t left Maplewood even once, since our needs are met so well here. We’re fans of the new owner of Maplewood Deli, and Asador del Sur is our main destination for Brunette Games lunch meetings.