Click anything to jump. Or press → and take the yellow brick road.
In 2001 I founded the design and film department at Visual Art: direct-to-client creative built on top of a post house’s craft. Many of the team at Goodbye Kansas Studios today share that same origin story.
The move you described at lunch, a post-heavy house building its creative layer, is one I’ve already made inside this company’s own ancestry.
I’d made the same move before at Rising Sun Pictures, and I spent the last decade running the finished version of it: Brokendoll, a strategy and creative studio built on a small senior core, working with Microsoft, Paradox and Mojang.
What follows is the model I promised you: how the division works, why the economics hold, and how I’d build it inside Kansas.
From the outside, Kansas holds a position most studios can only dream about: the highest-profile jobs in games, the biggest budgets in the category, and a reel it’s almost an honour to appear on. That is not a company that needs fixing.
So why is premium so hard to turn into profit? The oldest rule in the book: 20 percent of the effort produces 80 percent of the result. Tentpole work is glorious, and it is also lumpy, bid for, and expensive to win. That math is unforgiving for every studio at this tier, not just this one. Your own phrase for it is quality of revenue: the level was never the problem; the shape is.
And the answer is not to cut. You don’t cut your way out of a premium position. You expand it: into the higher-margin work around the tentpole, and into regular, dependable asset generation that smooths the swings.
Don’t cut. Expand.
The division you described is the one I’m proposing: a small, strategy-first entity under the Kansas umbrella, on the right side of the 80/20 rule. It owns the brief upstream, sells the full campaign, and prices from strategy instead of from hours.
Execution runs through a new pipe, built for campaign economics rather than tentpole economics: AI-native workflows, a variable freelance layer, and Kansas’s own AAA assets as the raw material. Where the work needs AAA craft, the valve opens toward the Kansas bench at internal rates. The studio keeps selling the tentpole. The division sells everything around it.
It opens two doors at once: the rest of the campaign on clients Kansas already has, and the AA tier the studio’s cost structure can’t currently price for.
Before the script is written, we write the brief.
Goodbye Kansas is a Wizard of Oz reference. Dorothy is the one who actually leaves Kansas: small, determined, and the reason the story goes anywhere. dot is the working name for the division, and it completes your own metaphor from inside your own brand world.
A sub-brand only works with a distinct personality and a clear position of its own. Never “Goodbye Kansas but smaller”: the parent lends the reputation, and the sub-brand does the leaving.
dot is a working name, not a decision. But it shows the method at work: naming, positioning and identity from a blank page is precisely the discipline the division sells.
The naming is the demo.
Stage one is a design engagement. We define the offer, the pricing, the name, the pipeline and the anchor clients: the division on paper, with revenue attached, before a single fixed cost exists. It also lets both sides test the working relationship while it’s still cheap to be wrong.
Stage two, at launch, I step in as founder-operator: running the creative and the vision, with operational support building underneath as revenue scales. The senior core stays small. That’s not a constraint; it’s the model.
Revenue before fixed costs. The rule applies to me too.
A modern game launch buys strategy, brand identity, key art, cinematic trailers, live-action, gameplay capture, dev diaries, social content and a hundred versioned deliverables behind them. The list is long, and it’s bought as a campaign, increasingly from whoever owns the strategy.
Kansas sells the most prestigious line on that list: the tentpole trailer. One line. The rest is commissioned elsewhere, at margins the trailer never sees, by people the trailer vendor never meets.
The client buys the list. Kansas sells one line of it.
For every trailer, Kansas builds AAA-grade characters, environments, rigs and performances: some of the most expensive assets in the business, paid for once and usually retired after ninety seconds of screen time.
A campaign pipe that starts from those assets instead of from zero produces key art, social content, dev diaries and versioned deliverables at marginal cost. No outside agency can match that price, because no outside agency has the assets.
That’s the industrial logic under the division: the studio makes the hero asset; dot amortises it across the entire campaign.
Everyone else starts from a blank file.
The division’s own headcount stays small and senior, permanently. Execution runs through a valve with two settings. Campaign volume, meaning key art, social, dev diaries and versioning, runs through the new pipe: AI-native, freelance-variable, built on the studio’s assets. Craft peaks, meaning cinematics and hero renders, pull the Kansas bench at internal rates.
Either way the division’s P&L stays variable-cost, and the studio only ever sees upside: pre-sold premium work when the valve opens toward the bench, no fixed-cost load when it doesn’t.
At Brokendoll the freelance line swung five-fold month to month on identical headcount: 258K one month, 1.3M SEK the next. That’s the point. The cost only exists when the revenue does.
The bench stops being overhead the day the work arrives pre-sold.
Your AA-to-AAA framing maps exactly onto the model’s two documented capacity bands:
Scaling adds senior leads and valve width. Never fixed capacity.
The unit economics were never the problem.
Three times I’ve built a 360 offering for post-heavy companies: taking craft houses upstream into strategy, direct to the people who commission the work.
One direction the whole way: closer to the client, further up the value chain.
This goes beyond writing and creating concepts. It’s brand-based: positions, platforms and identities that campaigns get built on. Before the script is written, we write the brief.
And it’s 0-to-1 thinking: naming, positioning and building from a blank page. It’s the hardest brief, and the one dot itself will be born from.
The relationships already exist: since Crusader Kings III, Paradox has asked me personally to define every grand-strategy brand they own. A Sharkmob tone-of-voice workshop grew into naming and brand copy. Minecraft kept me embedded for eight years, Eurovision reached 200 million viewers, Microsoft made us a Preferred Supplier.
I was coming home anyway.
Thank you for reading. Let’s talk.