Redefining Gaming, Esports, and Entertainment Culture

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/08/23

 Ian Packard, co-founder and COO of OS Studios, has been instrumental in reshaping the gaming, esports, and entertainment industries. Alongside John Higgins, Packard built OS from a two-person operation into a global creative force, working with major clients like Riot Games, Netflix, and the NBA. Through innovative scaling strategies, passion-driven hiring, and a relentless focus on community engagement, OS Studios has delivered groundbreaking productions like Call of Duty: Next. Packard emphasizes the transformative impact of AI and live streaming on the future of gaming, predicting dynamic and evolving player experiences. OS Studios’ success reflects the integration of gaming into mainstream culture and live entertainment.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Today, we are here with Ian Packard. He is the co-founder and COO of OS Studios, a creative agency specializing in gaming, esports, sports, and entertainment — all rapidly growing industries. As a side note, for those who may not know, the global gaming industry is now larger than the Hollywood film industry!

After meeting co-founder John Higgins at the National Film and Television School in the United Kingdom, the duo launched Mayhem Studios in London and later founded OS Studios in New York in 2018.

Under Ian’s operational leadership, OS grew from just two team members to more than 40, with offices in New York, London, and APAC, and was acquired by Project Worldwide in 2021. Ian has led significant projects for clients such as Riot Games, Netflix, and Major League Baseball, bringing deep production expertise, strategic innovation, and thought leadership to the evolving intersection of gaming, sports, and digital media. 

Thank you very much for tuning in. I appreciate it. So, what inspired you and John Higgins to launch OS Studios? I interviewed John about it before. Now, we will hear your version.

Ian Packard: I think it is fun to share this because John and I — the success of our partnership, really — well, you have met John. John is a big presence and comes from a theatre background. My mannerisms are almost the opposite of that. I think contrast has been the secret to our success in many ways.

We had worked together before at Mayhem (our previous UK-based agency) and met during film school. Finding someone to go into business with is the hardest part. I have known plenty of friends for ten years who you think would make great business partners, but you are just great friends, not great co-founders. Sometimes, the best possible outcome is exiting a business and salvaging a friendship.

What John and I found was a sporadic connection. I hate using “synergy” — let us not say “synergy” — but we developed a professional relationship that could last. Six years in, we still have an incredibly strong business partnership. We still talk for hours. We chatted while on our treadmills before work this morning. Some of it is work-related, but a lot is just maintaining the connection.

Without going too far off track, the real reason for launching OS was that, after years of working with different people, we realized we had found the right match with each other.

Also, John and I are builders — we like to create new things rather than fit them into existing systems. As John probably mentioned, it was also a matter of timing. Gaming and esports were at an inflection point then.

Our first major client was the NBA. They approached us and said we wanted to launch a Twitch channel. What does that involve? What do you need from us? That set things in motion.

Jacobsen: When you both realized that this was the direction you wanted to go in, what did that look like?

Packard: I remember that exact moment in our office. I leaned over to John and said, “We should do this.”

Starting with a client like the NBA puts you in quite an advantageous position because you immediately have a strong showreel. From there, things just spiralled. Aside from gaming evolving from a niche genre into a broader cultural force, I think the biggest thing was that live streaming — the backbone of how broader audiences were consuming gaming content — became accessible with relatively affordable, off-the-shelf equipment.

Previously, to create a live, multi-camera broadcast, you had to spend $50,000, $60,000, $70,000 — even millions — on equipment typically reserved for traditional broadcasters like ESPN. Six years ago, you could suddenly walk into a store, spend about $10,000, and today, that cost is probably closer to $2,000, and get the tools to produce a live multi-camera show. That shift and the excitement around gaming’s rise made it clear: “Okay, let’s do this.”

That was the gestational point for us.

Jacobsen: Now, scaling is a significant challenge for any business. You went from two employees to over 40 — a 20-fold increase. What were the challenges in scaling in this industry? Or, given gaming’s explosive growth, was it relatively easy?

Packard: There were a few things that helped. One thing I’ve loved about launching OS in the US five or six years ago is that if there’s a problem to be solved, someone has already thought of a software or service to make it easier.

Even little things like “How do you do payroll?” became real questions when we started. Traditionally, you would go out, hire an accountancy firm, and pay an exorbitant fee. Health insurance was another massive cost.

Scaling for us was about not necessarily doing things the way they had always been done. We looked for smarter, more cost-effective solutions: payroll companies designed for small businesses and health insurance providers that catered to startups. Rather than hiring headhunters at a 25% salary commission, John and I became very hands-on and astute in our hiring practices.

When I think about OS, I don’t know whether someone went to college. I am not interested in what degree someone has or whether they finished high school. Whether they are passionate about what we build and engage with the medium matters.

That approach allowed us to scale without using traditional hiring strategies. We found people who genuinely love the games we work with and the publishers we partner with. They are, in fact, the same audience we are trying to reach. We could recruit directly from communities — from Discord servers, not LinkedIn pages.

So, yeah, there was a lot of “building the plane as we flew it,” as every startup does — and I know it’s a bit of a cliché. But for us, it was really about using innovative tools in the market.

Jacobsen: How did Mayhem shape the collaborative and creative approach to building OS Studios? 

Packard: Well, we joke, but honestly, every startup is a little bit of organized chaos, right?

Mayhem comes from John’s original company, Managing Mayhem, which is a perfect metaphor for agency and startup life. For us, Mayhem was a real foundation. We came out of film school together. John already had a strong theatre background, putting on big shows, and I had been doing a lot of work in sports, which was initially my dream.

Mayhem taught us just how crowded the UK market was for the kind of work we were doing. Mayhem was a branded content production company — traditional TV commercials, promo videos, and the like.

The real lesson, which still shapes OS today, was to find your niche.

If I take it even further back, I remember when I was 19 or 20, I was working at IMG — a big sports production company. I had a conversation with the head of production there, and he said something that stuck with me: “Find your niche.”

He told me that there are a trillion production companies in the world, a trillion people who can buy cameras, and if you want to go into sports, you are competing against people who have been there for decades.

That advice stayed with me. At the time, gaming and esports were still perceived as niche. Now, of course, we know gaming is bigger than Hollywood.

But back then, traditional media did not take gaming seriously. That perception — that gaming was “small” or “unimportant” — helped us thrive because we saw where things were going before legacy media caught up.

We recently added a nice feather to our cap by talking to a big sports client a few weeks ago about becoming their new broadcast partner. Their big point was, “Look, 50 or 60 companies can do this the very traditional way. But I want something different. You guys are different, and that’s why I’m here. I want you to devise a new way of doing this because we need new eyeballs, younger viewers, and audience engagement.”

Right now, I think sports are — hopefully — starting to experience a renaissance in adjusting to how audiences consume content. Formula 1 has done quite a good job with that to a degree, but there is still so much more that traditional sports can learn from gaming.

It is essential to break down the walls of legacy media — the mentality of “We only do it this way” — why shouldn’t sports be broadcast on TikTok? Why should sports not have truly interactive audience engagement?

Twitch, for example, has built incredible models with extensions, bits, and digital currencies — and by that, I don’t mean crypto or NFTs. I mean mechanisms that allow audiences to engage without spending $200 monthly on a cable subscription.

I love sports, and I watch a lot of them. But I haven’t had a cable subscription since I moved to the States — it simply doesn’t make sense anymore.

If sports leagues want to maintain their relevance, especially amid concerns about an aging fan base, they must reinvent themselves now. For example, Major League Baseball and NASCAR have fan bases that tend to be older. They need to be thinking about how to reach the next generation.

So, yes, I’ve gone off on a bit of a tangent, but that mantra of “Let’s do things differently” is real for us, not just a startup cliché.

When we apply that approach across gaming culture, sports, music, and entertainment, we view it all under the same umbrella: live entertainment.

The question becomes: What can traditional entertainment industries learn from the strengths gaming, especially esports, has developed over the years of reinventing live media consumption?

Jacobsen: Now, what about some insights you can give us behind the scenes — for instance, about Call of Duty: Next or Arcane’s global activations?

Packard: I would say it was not just a launch. It was a moment.

Two things made Call of Duty: Next so exciting. First, it was an affirmation for me — that what we are doing has a much broader impact than just. This is our business. We enjoy media production, and we love gaming. Saying it that way sounds very low-key, but Call of Duty: Next was the first time we did an event where I had friends from university, friends from home in the UK, friends from school texting me like, “Oh, wow, you guys did that? That’s epic. I had no idea you were behind that!”

Sometimes, when you’re making something or producing something, you get so lost in the sauce. There are 300 staff on-site. It’s a vast operation. When you’re there creating it, you forget how broad the impact can be.

For context for anyone listening, Call of Duty: Next is the annual launch event Activision holds each year to reveal the new Call of Duty title. The first one was in 2022. Last year’s 2024 edition marked the third iteration, and OS Studios has produced each one since its inception.

The big USP (unique selling proposition) of Call of Duty: Next is that it is not a traditional product launch. Instead of one person standing on stage like at an Apple keynote or an old-school E3 presentation, you have 200+ streamers — prominent streamers, influencers from gaming culture, and celebrities — all given immediate access to the beta and broadcasting live to their audiences simultaneously.

It’s a deconstructed launch. And what’s fantastic about that, beyond the incredible audience metrics and organic engagement, is the technical side.

Technically, we could have gotten a Guinness World Record for what we achieved. Having 200+ people go live from one room simultaneously, each to multiple social media platforms like Twitch and YouTube, plus running a main Activision broadcast that pulls from and integrates most of those feeds — there was no blueprint for how to do it.

We didn’t invent anything proprietary per se, but we worked closely with partners to develop new technical solutions. We devised a new operational method.

Jacobsen: It is like a weird, scheduled meta-organic traffic model. You have your base 200 going live at a scheduled time, and then that branches out — not just full streams but clips, reactions, everything — all radiating out within that structured launch window.

Packard: It’s incredibly powerful.

Jacobsen: Also, do you get valuable feedback from the comment sections of those streams? Because if you are running a beta, you know bugs and issues will pop up. Early feedback could be hugely valuable to the development cycle.

Packard: Yes. However, to be clear, there is a big game development team at Activision — OS Studios that has nothing to do with actually designing the game itself. But to have, to your point, that much tangible feedback in real-time, even while we’re juggling a massive logistics operation, is invaluable.

What’s nice is that the community we have there — the streamers and creators — are very tolerant of that. They’re just so excited to be there. They genuinely want the game to succeed, and the opportunity to meet the developers directly and provide feedback builds a healthy ecosystem.

That’s a big thing we at OS encourage our clients to do: Do not build for the community. Build with the community.

How do you create an event focusing on the community from the ground up, creating a platform for them to generate content without unnecessary micromanagement? Instead of barking orders, you give them a space and trust that they will figure it out.

Again, it ties back to OS Studios’ broader positioning: helping to evolve the mindsets of legacy media and agencies.

You know, the big traditional agencies that dominate Cannes Lions each year, winning 30 or 40 Lions annually. We entered our first Cannes Lion competition this year, which was a labour of love to pull together. But a lot of the time, these big agencies white-labeled us. 

They want to work with a smaller agency like OS because we’re genuinely connected to the culture — half of our staff isthe target audience. This connects to one of your earlier points: employers must be mindful of their industry and shape their hiring practices within that framework.

Jacobsen: In some sectors with standardized professional expectations — like accounting, taxes, or research — degrees and credentials are critical. You need that foundational knowledge to develop correctly in those fields, whether in practical domains like tax accounting or more theoretical ones like pure mathematics.

But in industries like video games, esports, and sports, where people are often borderline addicted to the subject matter out of pure passion, you want people who live and breathe it. Professionals in these spaces usually work eight to ten hours daily.

That is why your commentary is so relevant: In creative industries like gaming and entertainment, you need people who understand and feel the work. They know what it is like to play a game for one hour versus ten hours, and they even notice the differences depending on what time of day they play.

Packard: And to clarify, our accountancy team is more than qualified! But they don’t play Excel for eight to ten hours a day for fun.

Jacobsen: [Laughing] That is right. This is the thing — we still have big plans involving major brand names. Another Halo game, probably the next StarCraft, probably another Diablo, and another Call of Duty are coming around the corner at some point. League of Legends continues to get updates and revamps.

However, the gaming style is also changing, especially with VR and emerging technologies. How will gaming change over the next five years, especially with deeper AI integration? For instance, a level boss in the future might not just be a scripted program — it could learn and adapt dynamically to how the team fights it. And second, how do you see the value of entertainment changing?

Packard: Oh, that’s a hard but good one.

To your point, I have been fascinated by the AI side for a while. AI is an incredible tool, but it can also be badly misused.

My skepticism shows whenever I read so many poorly written LinkedIn posts these days — the overuse of em-dashes, for example — and honestly, I would challenge 90% of people even to know where an em-dash is on the keyboard! [Laughs]

But seriously, we use AI a lot at OS. It is a fascinating tool. We have experimented with it across design, refining copy, and other creative processes. From a marketing agency perspective, we are just scratching the surface.

AI’s integration into gaming is going to be massive.

Game replayability is currently primarily served by regular updates, patches, and downloadable content (DLC).

Take Grand Theft Auto V, for example. It’s been over a decade since it launched, yet it has stayed alive and become a global phenomenon due to its DLCs, updates, and the strength of its dedicated online community.

Looking to the future, I see two major shifts:

First, I think the new Grand Theft Auto will bring an actual, functioning metaverse-style game to life. It won’t just be a place to play — it will be a fully realized, virtual version of yourself. Inside the game, there will be an internal economy and currencies with real value.

Many games have already touched on this. Look at NBA 2K — every year when the new title drops, people grind for fourteen or fifteen hours daily to level up their characters and gain advantages. Gaming is moving toward a much deeper fusion of identity, economy, and experience — AI will supercharge that.

But as we look at what Grand Theft Auto could become, it’s that proper kind of second-person experience — a metaverse-style experience — built for a ten-year life cycle, because GTA releases tend to last a decade.

And then, to your point, how does AI get leveraged to create a truly personalized gaming experience? Replayability is key. I grew up playing role-playing games like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.

Ironically, I grew up in a part of the UK where we didn’t have broadband until I was about 16. So, my gaming history was largely built offline, with long, single-player RPGs that could take 60-70 hours to complete. But imagine if I could replay a game like that — and through AI, it would evolve based on my play style.

It could learn what I enjoy most in role-playing, the choices I tend to make, and adapt the story, missions, and even final boss fights dynamically, rather than relying on traditional scripted mechanics or “fake AI” that we have seen until now.

So yes, I think AI, combined with the actual manifestation of open-world environments, will drive the future of gaming.

Borrowing lessons from games like Roblox, Minecraft, and others that hint at this model, Grand Theft Auto V could be a significant technical leap forward. Nobody knows what it will look like, but given Rockstar’s track record, it will be extraordinary.

Jacobsen: That is a great answer. What is your favourite quote about gaming culture? It does not have to be from a founder — just any quote about gaming culture that resonates with you.

Packard: Oh, that’s a hard one. [Laughing]

Honestly, I don’t have a specific quote off the top of my head. I won’t Google it, either. I want to keep it authentic. But if I were to create a quote, it would go something like this:

“Gaming culture today is like what music was in the 1990s — it’s everywhere, embedded in everything.”

To say that gaming is still a standalone genre or a niche entity is just inaccurate. Gaming is now part of every aspect of culture.

We hear so much talk about “gamification.” Many of our clients, whether in sports, entertainment, or music festivals, ask, “How do we apply gamification to what we are doing?“

So, paraphrasing that into a quote:

Gaming is no longer a niche but is woven into the cultural fabric.

There’s still an old stereotype that gaming is just about teenagers sitting in basements, but that’s completely outdated. Gaming today is collaborative, social, creative, and community-driven.

There’s also an older quote from Andy Serkis that says, “Every Age has its storytelling form, and video gaming is a massive part of our culture. You can ignore or embrace video games and imbue them with the best artistic quality. People are just as enthralled with video games as others are with the cinema or theatre. Over time, I think perceptions will change.”

I love this quote, as I think the article or interview is from 15 years ago now. It was a time when gaming wasn’t taken seriously, and he saw it as a legitimate form of storytelling. Looking at where we are now, with games shaping culture globally, it feels like Andy Serkis was ahead of his time.

Jacobsen: Authenticity is critical across every field, not just gaming.

Packard: Absolutely. Being inauthentic is never a recipe for success, no matter your industry.

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