Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Playstack

At Digital Dragons this year I somehow found myself attending a panel about games industry investment and publishing deals, featuring various senior M&A people gathered under the dread banner of "Capital Reality". It felt like visiting another planet, occupied by towering creatures of gold and green paper, who spoke an earwax-curdling vocabulary of phrases like "there's dry powder out there, but I'm seeing dealflop".

The best practice when you are stranded on a strange new world is to bond with local lifeforms in the most elementary and primordial terms. In this case, I established a point of connection with Victor Lee, director of Europe investments for Subnautica 2 publisher Krafton.…