Fireside Chat with Co-Founders of Critical Path Games
Join us for a fireside chat with Jesse Houston and Jeanne-Marie Owens, co-founders of Critical Path Games. After scaling Phoenix Labs to 350+ people and selling it twice, they started over with a 13-person team and a bold goal: finding the next great video game genre.
We’ll dive into:
Scaling, raising and selling a studio twice
Why they went back to small and in-office
The biggest lessons and turning points along the way
Chasing a new genre with Project: Echo
Big swings. Second acts. Come curious and bring your questions.
About Critical Path Games
Critical Path Games was founded in January of 2024, by industry veterans Jesse Houston and Jeanne-Marie Owens, with an ambitious goal of finding the next great video game genre. The studio is in the pre-production phase of its first title, codenamed Project: Echo. It is expected to launch in 2028, with full cross-play and cross-progression, on modern generation consoles as well as PC.
The studio is based out of Vancouver, Canada. It is a small 13 person team who, despite the ‘work remote from everywhere’ trends, thrive on working together in-office, every day, to facilitate seamless communication and create the fastest iteration loops.
Prior to Critical Path Games, from 2014 to 2023, Jesse and Jeanne-Marie led Phoenix Labs, the highly-successful developers behind Dauntless and Fae Farm, also headquartered in Vancouver, Canada. Over that time they raised $46M+ USD in funding, built a multi-national award-winning company, venture-scaled to 350+ people, 4 studios, and 7 projects, shipped multiple successful products, and sold the company twice.
About Jesse
Jesse Houston started his career at EA Vancouver, as a tester on the FIFA franchise. After spending time in Montreal at Ubisoft, and Edmonton at BioWare, he went on to helm Riot Games’ League of Legends. Under his stewardship, the game grew into a multi-billion dollar juggernaut, connecting hundreds of millions of players, and leading to the ascension of eSports as a global entertainment industry. In 2014, he co-founded Phoenix Labs where he served as CEO and Game Director on Dauntless.
About Jeanne-Marie
Jeanne-Marie Owens started her career at BioWare Edmonton, then spent several years working with the central technology teams at EA Vancouver. She was the first non-founder employee at Phoenix and spent close to a decade leading operations teams across HR, Recruiting, Finance, IT, as the company scaled. She also serves as Board Chair for DigiBC, the creative technology industry association in BC. Jeanne-Marie has been invited to speak internationally as a consultant and commentator on building great teams in the games industry. In 2021, she was named to the Business in Vancouver Forty Under 40 list, and has also been included in their BC500 influential leaders lists for the last two years.