Dylan Collins, the young Irish entrepreneur who has built and sold technology companies to two of the world’s biggest computer games firms, Activision and Gamestop, is leaving Jolt Online Gaming.
Collins’ story has been inspirational. While at Trinity College, Collins built and sold his first company, a mobile software venture. After graduating he began building his second company – Demonware – which developed the software that allowed the world’s top-grossing console games like Call of Duty to be played over the internet.
When Collins was 26, Activision, the world’s biggest games publisher, acquired the company for US$15m.
Following the acquisition, Collins realised a new major shift was occurring in the games business – the move to browser-based gaming – and went to work on a new venture, Jolt.
GameStop – a retail giant employing 48,000 people worldwide in 6,700 stores – made a major undisclosed investment in Jolt two years ago to capitalise on the obvious opportunities in advertising and micropayments.
As well as Jolt, Collins has been working away on a group e-commerce site for consumer electronics called Gruupy.com.
Collins departs from Jolt
Collins announced today that he’s leaving Jolt Online Gaming and GameStop.
“It’s been a fantastic journey building the company, and then integrating it with GameStop but it’s now time for me to move on,” he wrote in an email.
“When we started Jolt, I never once thought we’d end up being the world’s first hybrid social/retail game developer. It’s been a huge success and I can’t even begin to explain how much I’ve learned along the way, thanks to the brilliant people on both sides.”
Collins will be handing the reins of Jolt Online Gaming over to Richard Barnwell who will drive the next online game to come out of the Jolt stable, Championship Manager.
“I haven’t decided what I’m doing next but I do have a lot of interesting scribbles in my notebook,” Collins said.
