The main menu theme carried him all the way to the subway station.
Leo caught himself still humming it on the platform, stopped, then started again because it was genuinely that good.
The train downtown took twenty minutes.
He spent most of it thinking about the difficulty wall between levels ten and eleven, and whether the PlayForge team would hit it during the demo or stop before they got there.
He walked into the restaurant at 3:20.
The meeting wasn’t until four.
The PlayForge team was already there.
James Ward rose from the corner booth before Leo even cleared the host stand.
Head of marketing at PlayForge, James was in his early forties with broad shoulders and the kind of calculated, professional grip that squeezed hard enough to mean business without trying to break your knuckles.
Everything about him was dialed in.
His suit jacket hung over the chair back, and his sleeves were rolled to the forearm to telegraph a very specific vibe: senior enough to set the rules, relaxed enough that you wouldn’t feel the weight of them.
“Leo.
Glad you made it,” James said, his voice smooth and carrying just enough warmth to feel earned rather than forced.
Beside him, Sophie kept her eyes glued to a tablet screen, tapping a stylus against the glass with metronomic precision.
She was already logging the exact timestamp of Leo’s arrival before he’d even pulled out his chair.
Leo caught himself grinning at that.
Gotta respect someone who treats a handshake like data.
The third person at the table was a corporate attorney sitting quietly with a leather portfolio, the universal signal that somebody expected papers to get signed before lunch was over.
“Good to finally put a face to the name,” James said, offering a casual nod as Leo settled into his seat.
“I’ve gotta tell you, seeing one guy hold two of the top spots on our platform simultaneously isn’t something that happens every day.
You’ve had half our floor talking about you all week.” “Right place, right time, mostly,” Leo said, leaning back with an easy, untroubled smile.
“Plus, having a store that actually lets small games get seen helps.
PlayForge definitely earned its cut on those two.” It was a polite opening volley, but neither of them missed the unspoken game beneath it.
Leo needed PlayForge’s massive reach to scale up, and PlayForge needed Leo’s weird, viral hitmakers to keep their store looking fresh and competitive.
The whole lunch was really just about deciding who held the steering wheel.
The spread across the table was absurdly generous, way too much food for just four people.
Leo immediately registered the strategy: this wasn’t a stiff corporate pitch, but a dinner meeting.
Casual enough to get a guy to drop his guard over a high-end steak, yet polished enough to slide a contract across the cloth before dessert.
They spent the first half hour talking shop, letting the idle chatter roll naturally.
James was a master at the soft sell.
Whenever Leo finished a thought, James would linger on a beat of deliberate silence, letting Leo’s words hang in the air just long enough to prove he’d actually absorbed them.
It was a subtle, dangerous habit.
Most suits Leo had dealt with over two lifetimes treated meetings like a sprint to blurt out their next pre-packaged talking point.
James treated every sentence like a piece of intelligence gathering.
It made Leo weigh every word twice before letting it spill out, which was almost certainly the exact effect James was aiming for.
Then, right as the waiter cleared the main plates, James set his fork down with a sharp, decisive click.
The small talk was officially over.
“Alright, let’s talk real numbers,” James said, leaning forward and resting his forearms on the wood.
“PlayForge wants to bring you in-house.
Full-time.
We’re talking Director of Game Design.
You get your own dedicated team, a real budget, and unfettered access to our entire internal dev pipeline.
Equity options, a high-tier compensation package, total creative backing.” He ticked each perk off on his fingers with smooth, unhurried confidence, clearly a pitch he’d rehearsed to perfection.
“We want you to lead the charge, Leo.” Director of Game Design at the biggest platform on the planet.
Leo kept his face entirely blank, masking the sudden spike in his pulse.
Everyone in the industry knew PlayForge’s internal game studio was wildly mediocre, but the sheer muscle backing it was terrifyingly huge.
Global distribution networks, server infrastructure, direct access to hundreds of millions of active players.
Hooking his vision up to that machine would be like strapping a rocket engine to a go-kart.
But James wasn’t done yet.
“On top of that, we’re cutting our commission on your existing titles,” James added, holding up two fingers.
“Getting Over It and Cat Mario.
We drop our cut down to ten percent.” Leo reached for his water glass, using the gesture to keep his hands from reacting.
Ten percent.
He’d walked into this room hoping to haggle PlayForge’s standard thirty percent cut down to somewhere in the high teens.
Handing over a ten percent rate was the kind of red-carpet treatment reserved for juggernaut publishers with billions in track record.
PlayForge was tossing it onto the table as a sweetening bonus just to get him to sign.
They were far more terrified of losing him than he’d calculated.
Which meant other major players had been knocking on their door trying to reach him, and PlayForge had been quietly telling them to kick rocks.
Good.
That was leverage he could use.
Still, taking the job was an absolute non-starter, regardless of how many zeroes they stacked on the paycheck.
Leo’s roadmap demanded total independence.
The studio he intended to build, the impossible development pipeline he was setting up, and the rapid-fire release strategy he planned to execute simply wouldn’t survive a single quarter inside a corporate hierarchy.
He needed complete operational freedom to build his way, for reasons he could never justify to a board of executives or an HR department.
The real puzzle was figuring out how to decline the golden handcuffs without burning down the bridge.
“James, I’m genuinely blown away,” Leo said, setting the glass back down onto the tablecloth with a soft clink.
“I’ll be straight with you, that’s a significantly better offer than I anticipated coming in here today.
But I’ve been running on my own steam for a while now, and jumping back into an executive corporate structure is a massive pivot.
I need a few days to digest this.” James held his gaze, his eyes narrowing slightly as he weighed the answer.
Leo could practically see the wheels turning in the man’s head: Is this guy actually thinking it over, or is he just giving me a polite, diplomatic rejection wrapped in velvet?
“Fair enough,” James said, breaking the silence with an easy nod.
“Take all the time you need.” He leaned across the table, his tone shifting to something lower, more direct.
“Position aside, I want to make sure we lock in a rock-solid relationship here.
Whenever you finish your next project, I want PlayForge to be your absolute first call.” “That,” Leo said, breaking into a clean smile, “I can guarantee you right now.” The tension in the air evaporated instantly.
Sophie tapped out another line on her tablet, while the lawyer quietly capped his pen, reading the room and realizing no contracts were getting signed over dessert after all.
Leo let the comfortable silence linger for a second.
Then, with deliberate slowness, he reached down beside his chair and lifted his laptop bag, setting it squarely in the middle of the table.
“Speaking of future games,” Leo said, unzipping the main compartment, “there’s actually something I brought along to show you.”