Kevin Lambert, Co-founder and Chief Product Officer for Koin Games, sat down with Upptic to discuss his career as a veteran game designer, and what’s on the horizon for games with Web3 and AI.
Lambert, who has been in the industry for over 30 years, always knew his calling was to create games even from a young age. “When I saw them in the 70’s, which was like at a roller skating rink there was a pinball machine and a couple video games,” he says. “I’m like this is what I want to do, how do I do this?”
That question led to decades of work across the industry. Lambert began his career at Monolith in the 90’s as a game designer and programmer. Following his time at Monolith, Lambert started a studio Sierra Online, which was later acquired by Activision. In the last arc of his career, he got into casual gaming, as the Head of Design for Microsoft Casual Games. “The studio that made Solitaire and Mine Sweeper, and games your grandma is probably playing.”
All of this, before Lambert began on his current venture as Co-founder and CPO of Koin Games, a video game development company whose mission is to “develop blockchain enhanced video games that revolutionize gaming as we know it.”
Even with Lambert’s decades of experience, he still faces challenges. The biggest? Not creating the game, rather finding product market fit, and knowing how to market your game. “You can make an excellent game and nobody’s going to know about it because you can’t get the word out,” he says. “Especially mobile games, are really hard now.”
This is where mobile game marketing becomes mission-critical. Lambert noted that without strong game marketing or advertising, even great titles can disappear. He emphasized the importance of building a thoughtful mobile game marketing strategy and, in many cases, working with a specialized gaming marketing agency to help studios break through. “You can’t ignore marketing,” Lambert says. “It’s just as important as development itself.”
The Co-founder also discussed Web3 games, originally getting excited about the Web3 intersection in 2017. In 2021, during the NFT boom, he saw people start to pay attention to blockchain games as they became more popular, but didn’t think there were any actual good games. Lambert discussed his motivation for wanting to start a studio, wanting to bring “good games DNA,” to blockchain. Lambert discussed his experience and familiarity being in Crypto, and felt very comfortable with the space.
“We can’t aim to compete only with Web3 games,” Lambert says. “The game can’t just be good and by the way it has a token and NFT’s. It has to be a great Web2, Web3 experience as well and no one has cracked that yet.”
Lambert said he came to the space to really explore what you can do with digital property ownership. “That’s really the only thing Web3 brings to a game, the thing that you must use it for that you can’t have in the same way in Web2.” He says while property ownership may seem like a small difference, it’s anything but. “It’s huge because it’s not just your items you own, it’s parts of the game itself, it’s IP royalty sharing that’s trustless, there’s just so many things you can do.”
What is the Co-founder excited about? It’s simple. “I’m excited about the experiences, I’m not excited about looking at the numbers go up although that comes with excellent experiences in some cases as well,” he says. “It’s not just so you can sell it, it’s also because I own this piece of property in your game, what’s my experience and why is that different than just a database or having a sword in World of Warcraft or a card in Magic Arena, how is your game different than that?” Lambert continued, saying, “I feel like I’ve made games that did well, they were successful, they made a lot of money or had a lot of users, that was really exciting. So now I’m looking to do something different, and that is let’s see if we can make ownership meaningful.”
Looking towards the future, Lambert points to an expanding theme that he believes will only grow moving forward, a combination of AI and Augmented Reality in games. According to Totally Human Media, 1 out of every 5 new games released in 2025 disclosed GenAI usage.
But even as tools evolve, Lambert remains focused on the fundamentals: fun, innovation and player experience. Whether he’s building with blockchain, reimagining a decades-old puzzle game, or exploring AI generated content, it all comes back to the same spark he felt back at the roller rink in the 1970s.
For Lambert, success will come not only from making great games, but also from mastering gaming marketing. As he put it, creativity and technology can only shine if players actually discover your game—and that’s why strong video game advertising and mobile gaming marketing are as essential as good design.
“I just wanted to make games.”