Miguel Perotti

Lead Game Designer at Lingokids

Interested in EdTech startups, at the beginning of 2018 I joined the exciting project of Lingokids, an app that today has an extensive catalog of educational games and activities for children from 2 to 8 years old and aims to soon become one of the most iconic and recognizable children’s brands in the world.

We were a team of about 30 people when I arrived, and today we are more than 130 professionals of different nationalities. Being part of the growth of Lingokids, as a company and as a product, is being an incredible journey, full of challenges, learning and great moments with a wonderful team of professionals.

There, as Lead Game Designer, I am creatively responsible for the designs of the games we produce: from the initial concept phase, development, conducting user tests in schools, collaborating with the education department, analyzing usage data, and also leading and mentoring the team of designers with whom I am fortunate to work. I also work closely with the Product team on matters more related to product design and user experience.

In these nearly 6 years, we have created hundreds of new games that have always been previously tested by children before being published, ensuring that usability, fun, and learning are always present. The User Tests with children that we conduct are an immense and inexhaustible source of knowledge for any Children’s Product Designer, regardless of the years of experience they have.

This focus on quality and excellence that extends throughout the entire company has resulted in Lingokids receiving the Kidscreen Award for Best Learning Preschool App two years in a row (in 2022 and 2023), and we have been nominated again for the 2024 edition.

Something I love about working at Lingokids is that, as a good startup, it’s committed to innovation, allowing me to stay at the forefront of the latest technological advances to experiment with them in the children’s and educational world. For example, we are now exploring different uses of Generative AI within our games.

Head of Interactive at Zinkia Entertainment

In love with the Pocoyo brand (and I still am) and eager to make educational games for kids with his IP, I joined the team at Zinkia Entertainment in 2011.

Once there, and completely fascinated by the concept of apps brought by the arrival of the iPhone, I approached the then President of Zinkia to propose the development of Pocoyo apps within the company.

Zinkia had already published several Pocoyo games for consoles and computers, but with its target audience being kids from 2 to 4 years old, the control systems of joysticks, keyboards, and mouse were not the best option for this preschool target. However, being able to interact with Pocoyo by directly touching a screen was.

I was told that Zinkia wanted to have Pocoyo apps, but with one condition: the company would not invest any money in the project. So, I would have to figure out how to carry it forward.

And so I did.

Actually the project started almost as an intra-startup within Zinkia.

As Head of Interactive, I began by establishing agreements with third parties, companies that developed our apps at no cost in exchange for a percentage of the profits they generated.

The first successes came with apps that became very popular like Talking Pocoyo, which had millions of downloads and began to generate significant revenue for Zinkia.

I established relationships with Apple, Google, and Amazon, and we managed to get many global features of our apps in different stores. This increased downloads and, consequently, revenue, allowing us to start forming an internal development team, thus eliminating the dependence on third parties and increasing the net income the apps generated.

After 7 years, Pocoyo apps had more than 40 million downloads, all produced internally thanks to a team of 9 people, and generated net revenue for the company of around one million euros annually. We made Pocoyo games for mobile devices and educational apps for kids to learn the alphabet, numbers, English, and even classical music. Several of these apps won significant awards like a Kidscreen Award in the “Best Learning Preschool App” category for Pocoyo Playset.

Despite the relief provided by the app’s revenue, Zinkia went through a series of very difficult economic times, leading to bankruptcy proceedings and a subsequent change of ownership. In 2023, the French media company Animaj, specialized in children’s brands, acquired Pocoyo. This also included the apps, which pleases me greatly because I know they will continue to give them the life and care they deserve.

Game Designer at CMY Multimedia

I started in 2005 as a Game Designer at CMY Multimedia, a small developer studio of educational games for kids (now defunct) that was part of the Eurocolegio Casvi in Madrid, where I could combine two of my passions: developing videogames and education, something that marked me on a professional level forever.

There, as the only Game Designer on the team, I was responsible for everything related to the design of the graphical adventures and the educational and curricular exercises they included.

It was a very fruitful period, in which I learned to make videogames by actually making them. Additionally, the fact that CMY Multimedia was part of a school allowed me to be in contact with teachers and educators to implement educational improvements to the games and test them in the technology classroom with children aged 3 to 12 years, the target age group for these games.

During the two years I was there, we published 15 games in physical format, many of which I still hold dear. I especially remember, and with some pride, the game “The Adventures of Don Quixote“, as it was a significant challenge and responsibility as a designer.

Senior Game Designer at Pyro Studios

While I was at Avanzo, one day I received a call from who had been my boss at CMY Multimedia. He was working at Pyro Studios (creators of the successful Commandos series) at the time and asked me if I would like to go work with him.

I didn’t need to think long and of course, I said yes.

At Pyro Studios the development of videogames was much more sophisticated than at CMY Multimedia. And although the work was therefore more demanding, I was very fortunate to have some exceptional fellow designers from whom I learned much of what I know today about the theory and practice of Game Design.

I started as a Narrative Designer on what is still one of the most well-known canceled projects within the video game industry in Spain, namely COPS: a police game with a strong narrative component. Later as Game Designer I worked on another cancelled project, which would have been Commandos 4.

Later, Pyro shifted more towards the development of social games (around that time, games like FarmVille on Facebook were booming), and I, as a Game Designer and then as Senior Game Designer, was responsible for designing some of those projects.