Founded in 2017, Jago Studios creates and publishes interactive social entertainment oozing with irreverence and virality. Their core team of game and brand veterans have decades of experience developing high profile, influential entertainment licenses and intellectual properties. Jago Studios invents, designs, and launches compelling play experiences made for mobile-first lifestyles, tickling the funny bone and strengthening meaningful social connections as people play together and laugh together. Jago is currently creating a series of comical free-to-play mobile RPG Card Battlers.
Meet Our Team
Stuart Drexler, Jago Studios CEO and Founder
Stuart Drexler is a product leader and digital innovator with over 20 years of experience creating interactive games, toys, and content for global brands including Club Penguin, Moshi Monsters, Habbo, Barbie, Elmo, Harry Potter and LEGO. As Jago Studios CEO and Founder, Stuart leads a team of designers and developers to create infectiously compelling mobile games with high profile IP.
In previous roles as VP Product Design and Production for Disney Interactive Media Group, Stuart oversaw product development across all of Disney’s virtual worlds, including the ground-breaking Club Penguin massively multiplayer online gaming platform. At UK-based Mind Candy, Stuart led the development team for Moshi Monsters MMO, which grew to over 100 million registered users. His initiatives as EVP, Brand Development for Polly Pocket strategically nurtured Polly as the world’s number one small doll brand and facilitated its sale to Mattel in early 2007. And as Creative Director of Global Innovation at LEGO, Stuart directed product development for LEGO MindStorms programmable robotics toys and led his team to originate the LEGO Knights Kingdom franchise, earning a coveted Toy Of The Year award from The Toy Industry Association.
Stuart participated in the Future of Play initiative at the MIT Media Lab and holds a Master of Technology, Innovation & Education degree from Harvard. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, two sons, and one crazy cat.
Aaron Nemoyten is a game designer, programmer, and producer with a decade of experience across mobile, social, and console games. His experience includes seven years at EA’s Capital Games studio, where he contributed to free to play games on Facebook and mobile. As live services producer on Heroes of Dragon Age, Aaron developed processes and tools for running successful, efficient games with a small, dedicated team. He translated that success to Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes, where he ran the live service team from before soft launch through six months after worldwide launch, including major releases that propelled the game to the top grossing charts worldwide.
Aaron’s eclectic experience includes working on cinematics for the Madagascar game, producing and selling a documentary short to CurrentTV, playing drums and writing music in several bands, booking bands and mixing sound at concerts, and he even once got paid to write funny ringtones back when people still bought them. Aaron also worked as a designer on the recent re-release of the hit mobile game Color Switch.
Scott Shaw!, Art and Animation
For more than forty-five years, Scott Shaw! has written and drawn underground comix (Fear And Laughter, Gory Stories Quarterly), kids’ comic books (Captain Carrot And His Amazing Zoo Crew!, Sonic The Hedgehog, Simpsons Comics), comic strips (Bugs Bunny, Woodsy Owl), graphic novels (Annoying Orange), TV cartoons (Jim Henson’s Muppet Babies, The Completely Mental Misadventures Of Ed Grimly, Camp Candy), toys (McFarlane Toys’ line of Hanna-Barbera and Simpsons action figures), and advertising (Pebbles Cereal commercials starring the Flintstones). His work has garnered him four Emmy Awards, an Eisner Award and a Humanities Award. He was one of the kids who created what is currently known as Comic-Con International: San Diego. Scott also is known for presentations of “the craziest comic books ever published;” Oddball Comics Live! and his regular participation in Quick Draw! with Mark Evanier and Sergio Aragonés.
Some of his most recent projects have been: illustrating Dark Horse’s How To Win At Life…by Cheating At Everything!; designing, drawing and art-directing Gerrish Press’ Marooned Lagoon, a children’s picture book; designing and illustrating the wraparound cover for Bear Manor’s Long Title: Looking For The Good Times; Examining The Songs Of The Monkees One By One; writing the introductions for Titan Books’ Yellow Submarine graphic novel adaptation and photographer Greg Preston’s new collection of portraits of cartoonists in their studios, The Artist Within, Photographic Portraits Of Artists: Book 2; and art directing mobile games for Jago Studios.
Lian Amaris, Marketing and Community
Lian Amaris has been creating, studying, and writing about games, transmedia storytelling, and immersive environments since 2003. From 2012-15 she worked on bringing over 35 free-to-play mobile games to market at Glu Mobile where she oversaw content development and communication strategies for communities of over 3 million people. She led community marketing initiatives for Glu’s entire portfolio, including Kim Kardashian: Hollywood and the Deer Hunter franchise. She created original campaigns and content for partners including Kim Kardashian, Skydance, MGM, Philips, Apple, (RED), and Google Play. Additionally, she led a six-month project with the GoogleX team in an exclusive R&D partnership for Google Glass; the work resulted in her being named as an inventor on two awarded patents for interpreting image-based mobile messaging and interactive hands-free game tutorials. Working with Gumi from 2015-2017, she developed and implemented the community strategy for bringing Japanese mobile RPG Phantom of the Kill to a Western market.
Since 2015, Lian has written over 150 mobile game reviews and gameplay guides for mobile gaming outlet Gamezebo. She has Master’s degrees from NYU in Interactive Telecommunications and in Performance Studies, was a full-time professor of Performance Studies and New Media for three years, was a 2011 writing resident with Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts and spent several years as an editor and copywriter for media theorist Doug Rushkoff. Her work has been covered by The New York Times, Forbes, Salon, Women 2.0, The Next Web, MSNBC, Buzzfeed, The Huffington Post, The New York Post, Allure, The Laughing Squid, New Media Rockstars, Geeksugar, The Daily Kos, The Daily What, and more.
Giorgo Paizanis, User Acquisition
Giorgo has more than 10 years of experience in digital marketing and user acquisition. As a board member and former VP User Acquisition & Monetization for Sulake, he led the global launch of Habbo Hotel and Hotel Hideaway mobile games and drove 18 million new players annually across all platforms. He launched countless new products and features into the Habbo Virtual world to maintain an active user base of millions. Experienced managing multilingual live games with customers in over 30 countries and 12 languages.
Currently Director of Corporate Development at Elisa, a leading European telecom, with focus on new business expansion in entertainment. Working on cutting edge projects in esports, video streaming, and artificial intelligence. Giorgo has a double bachelors degree in Economics and Marketing, MBA from Cass Business School in London and executive education in Mergers and Acquisitions at Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Eric is currently the Principal of Gossamer Consulting Group, which provides primary research on worldwide console and mobile markets. His company provides proactive insights into current trends in the market place and identifies opportunities for investments. With a deep industry expertise, Gossamer Consulting Group is able to monitor trends in the interactive space including emerging technologies to better position their industry and investor clients. Eric has over 20 years of experience in the video game business at Electronic Arts, Bay Street Research, Kabam, and Gossamer consulting.
Stephen Saiz is a digital media expert with more than 15 years of experience in the online and mobile space. He currently leads Performance Marketing for Amazon Game Studios, where he owns player funnel, growth, paid media & CRM across entire AGS slate of PC and mobile games.
Previously Stephen oversaw brand, consumer & B2B marketing and product strategy as the CMO for Oddz, a real money gaming platform. He was also Head of Worldwide Marketing for Disney’s mobile games division and GM, Mobile at Majesco Entertainment. During that time he launched more than 50 mobile apps and won Apple’s prestigious Editors’ Choice award five times, including Best Fitness App of 2013 for Zumba Dance. In addition to launching Disney.com onto mobile, Stephen led product strategy for the hit franchise Where’s My Water?, delivering hundreds of millions of downloads.
Stephen holds an MBA from USC’s Marshall School of Business and two Bachelors Degrees from UC Berkeley. A dedicated philanthropist who has worked with many nonprofit groups, Stephen is currently a founding board member for HNDP, an innovative music and digital arts organization.
With over 20 years in the video game industry, Kenneth ran legal, business strategy and operations for 3 different video game developers/publishers, including Condor which become part of Blizzard Entertainment and released the hit games Diablo and Diablo II.
Illustrations by Edson “Tako” Takeuti