Founded: 2025
Specialty: Product Development Studio for Video Games
Location: Manchester, UK
Website: ludogamelabs.com
My Conversation with Matt Knott…
Matt Knott is a big believer in mixers. Not the back-to-back meeting format that dominates most industry events. Proper mixers, where eighty percent of your time is spent meeting people you do not know, add good roundtables, and you’ve got a great event. Unless you have one thing to sell and are speaking to the absolutely perfect people, back-to-back meetings aren’t always the best way to make the most of these events. To Matt, grabbing a beer with people you already know is fine, but events should be about opening doors, not just reinforcing existing relationships.
This philosophy extends to how Matt approaches the games industry itself. He has built a career by working across media sectors, connecting dots others might miss, and finding value in unexpected places. Now, with Ludo Gamelabs, he and co-founder Simon Smith are applying that same thinking to game development.
A Product Development Studio for Video Games
Ludo Gamelabs describes itself as a product development studio for video games. Crafting player-centric experiences that inspire joy across all platforms and formats. The studio draws on decades of combined experience between its founders. Matt, with a background in games, design, and media, has worked with major entertainment brands, including Hasbro, Disney, and the James Bond franchise. Simon brings over twenty years of experience in the games industry as a designer and producer at Codemasters, Blitz, Sony, and Reloaded. Most recently, he was Senior Game Scout at Team17 before co-founding Ludo Gamelabs.
Their mission is to transform ideas into captivating games through three distinct pathways. First, they create their own original IP in-house and work with external partners to deliver it to market. Second, they collaborate with game developers and publishers, inventing new ways to play and finding new audiences. Third, they work with licensors to take brands and franchises into games.
In practice, this means Ludo operates as a company that invents intellectual property. Mechanics, characters, environments. And they do it fast. Prototyping concepts into playables with a complete commercialisation strategy, ready for their clients to own their own, fully exploitable, Intellectual Property. Assets on which those studios can build value.
Joyful Play Experiences
At the core of Ludo Gamelabs is a belief in the fundamental human need to play. Matt’s childhood obsession with play has driven his entire career, and now, with Ludo, he and Simon are channeling that into creating joyful play experiences across video games. They’re working with several entertainment studios about proactively moving them into games, with Matt and Simon bridging the gap.
Matt’s own business and strategic consultancy, Schema and Spark, serves several clients. Including the AA / Indie porting specialist Pocket Sized Hands in Dundee. Also, Plan A Collective, the AAA experts in Czechia, whose work includes Battlefield and PayDay IPs. He also acts as an Advisor for major Publisher(s) where his production, creative, and operational expertise is called upon to write reports for C-Suite and Boards.
What Comes Next
Today, the games industry moves faster than almost any other creative sector. Ludo Gamelabs is betting that speed, clarity, and ownership will be the defining factors in the next decade of game development by positioning itself as the factory that makes the games.
Not just the games themselves, but the infrastructure, the IP, the systems that allow games to exist in the first place.
Learn more about Ludo Game Labs: ludogamelabs.com