Joleen Winther Hughes moderated a panel on creating a sustainable mobile app during Casual Connect USA 2014. In regards to big gaming companies and startups, she said “Obviously, the pressures are a lot different in both environments.” The panel continued to discuss the transition from startup to an established brand during the session.
Joleen Winther Hughes is the founder and principal of Hughes Media Law Group. When not working, she enjoys traveling or playing with her two Siberian Huskies, Finnegan and Foley. She reads voraciously and is part of a fabulous dinner group. She is also the co-owner, with her husband, of an authentic Irish pub, the Celtic Swell, on Alki Beach in West Seattle.
Hughes became involved with the games industry as the lawyer who put together RealArcade at RealNetworks, one of the first casual gaming networks. As she negotiated the deal, she became addicted to everything on the platform, from Typershark to Zuma to Bejeweled. She also worked on the Gamehouse acquisition. After she left RealNetworks, she helped out when one of her colleagues started Big Fish Games. Now she works with many top-selling game apps as in-house counsel. She loves the games industry passionately; it is just part of what she does.
Working Together With The Team
She has had many moments in this career that bring her a real sense of pride. The most recent was helping ZeptoLab to go from a three-person team to the powerhouse it is today, and being a part of the executive team. She feels the same about many other gaming clients, including Lima Sky, SmartBomb Interactive, Playmous, ClutchPlay Games, and Cascade Games Foundry. She says, “I think the reason I’m so proud is that ordinarily game companies look at lawyers as a necessary evil, but my team and I are true actual gamers, strategists, business developers and cheerleaders, and offer so much more than legal help.”
Before becoming a lawyer, Hughes was an entrepreneur who owned a successful artist management, talent booking, concert production, and special event business during the height of the Seattle music explosion, representing RKCDNY nightclub, Susan Silver and Kelly Curtis Management, and many music production companies. Prior to that, she was a marketing assistant at KING Broadcasting and a PR assistant, responsible for publicizing films from Disney, Paramount Pictures, and Warner Brothers in the Seattle market.
As an attorney, she was Senior Counsel for many years for RealNetworks, providing a broad array of business and legal affairs services. She was an integral part of the team that created MusicNet, the first legal, multi-label, digital music distribution initiative, RealArcade, the first casual gaming platform and the first digital content streaming and downloadable subscription and VOD models for major sports leagues, news organizations, motion picture studios, and many media companies around the world.
At Hughes Media Law Group, she assembled a world-class team of veteran media, technology, and entertainment attorneys, providing comprehensive, customized in-house/general services counsel to clients for the past decade. They have clients around the world from the US to the UK to Russia to Japan. She considers herself a dedicated legal executive, offering clients a wide range of services and strategy, including corporate, IP valuation and protection, patent, trademark, setting up employees and contractors, multi-level strategic licensing strategies, insight and experience on strategic transactions, drafting and negotiation of all types of agreements, and general overall company guidance.
Keeping Up With the Trends
Hughes works to stay abreast of all trends in the games industry, especially marketing and monetization. She believes sponsorships and multi-branded co-releases will be more and more prevalent, in order to ensure better success across platforms.
She is heavily involved in playing games, especially anything from their clients, such as Cut the Rope, Doodle Jump, and God of Light. She also loves PVZ2, Temple Run, and secretly likes Hay Day. She admits to a new addiction to Disco Bees and Sims Freeplay, and is determined to play Candy Crush without ever making a purchase. And because she owns a restaurant, she relentlessly plays every Diner Dash, Hotel Dash or PlayFirst game ever released.
She does own both Xbox and Playstation, but claims she is terrible at anything other than shooter console games. So she much prefers casual games.
She chooses iOS over Android, and plays almost exclusively on her iPad. And she states, “If you ask my husband, I’m always playing something – in airports, in the car, waiting in line for dinner, at hotels, while watching TV.”
Since her firm is mainly focused on cheerleading for their clients and business announcements, she invites everyone at Casual Connect USA to like their Facebook page to find out the latest information.
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