Stacey Hirata

“I met Stacey about a year or two before COVID. She came highly recommended and within ten minutes of our interview, I was ready to make her my COO for a brand new studio called Striking Distance Studios. She came on board, and together we created a plan to build this studio from scratch. Everything was new: new IP (Callisto Protocol), a brand new studio, new team, new engine, new parent company, new consoles. Along the way, we realized we needed our own HR, IT, benefits, and more. Stacey led the way, organizing the studio, setting up our HR department, operations, finance, recruiting, legal, and at the same time, helping out with the game and its needs. She took charge of the new studio build out and design which included a AAA mocap stage. A state of the art studio. She built the business plans and ran the quarterly updates with the parent company. We built a brand new rendering studio in Spain that reported into Stacey as well. Then COVID hit. Stacey didn’t skip a beat and got the company all set up at home—PCs, dev kits, and monitors for over 150 developers and also built out server farm in Vegas. COVID was hard, but again, Stacey set up ways of working and was the rock that the studio needed. She enabled me to be the Game Director and focus on the creative aspects. To add to the hurdles we faced, Stacey and I realized the internal publishing group had no experience with AAA games. We had to build a publishing organization and self-publish. Stacey’s extensive publishing background was exactly what we needed. We built the group from scratch, and they reported to Stacey. Many of the contacts were through her network. The publishing team, including Stacey, did such a good job that they were transferred from our studio to be the North American Publishing group after the game shipped. During COVID and the Great Resignation, we all took on new roles. Stacey handled them with enthusiasm, energy, and always had a plan and a backup plan. I’ve worked with many executives, C-Teams, and COOs, but Stacey is the most detail-oriented, laser-focused, just-get-things-done leader I’ve ever worked with. The team loves her, and her work ethic is beyond reproach. I promoted Stacey to President. She can plan, build and successfully manage anything from departments to a studio. She’s an inspiration to all. A true leader in our industry. ”

“Stacey has been a client partner of mine across several key stops in her career, with a partnership and friendship that has spanned decades starting with our time together working with Activision and Red Octane for Guitar Hero. She is one of the few executive leaders that has done just about everything across all facets of games publishing, and she has the ability to inspire, collaborate, listen, and synthesize, while also staying in the arena and make the tough decisions when they need to be made. That is leadership, and that is who you're getting when you work with Stacey. You're also getting someone who is pro-developer, and wants unique stories to be told through games, while creating the right paths for business success so that those stories can be told at scale, to reach new audiences. She is as nice as she is smart, being one of the few executives that has a deep intellectual curiosity, the ability to understand quant and qual metrics, while also showing an acute sense of EQ, empathy, team spirit, and stability in an industry that has been anything but stable in recent years. I highly recommend her, and am proud to call her a friend.”