Playtouch

Stéphane Hervé has never been one to settle. During university when he snagged an internship with an automotive manufacturer, he was hoping that his interests in cars could rev his career.

“I like cars,” he admitted to himself, “but not that much … not enough to work on them every day.” So he ended up steering away from tailpipes, asking himself instead, what product could I enjoy every single day?

The answer: video games.

Soon enough, he joined the burgeoning console scene at the time as a project manager (on both the original PlayStation and its sequel the PS2), then jumped into the wild frontier that was mobile, with its SMS and Java titles.

By 2010, smartphones were taking off, app stores were gatekeepers, and Stéphane spotted an opportunity: HTML5.

“If the same code can run anywhere, why lock it in a walled garden?” he wondered. That conviction became Playtouch, a game development studio headquartered in France with a hub on the paradisiac island of Mauritius, where today, 19 artists and engineers work on everything from animation to sound, while Stéphane handles biz-dev, finance, and big picture strategy.

The name came easy: play plus all the touch interfaces that were coming onto the gaming scene. “It says exactly what we do,” he notes.

Fifteen years after its scrappy beginnings, Playtouch has grown into a gaming studio, where a shared HTML5 framework means roughly 80 percent of the codebase can be reused from one title to the next, a discipline that has allowed the team to ship more than 400 games without needing to add a lot of headcount and budget.

That efficiency powers impressive reach as well. On a typical day, hundreds of thousands players tap a Playtouch title. Plus, distribution is amplified by those fifty some odd partners who embed the studio’s HTML5 games, a model that keeps discovery costs low while letting Playtouch stay nimble.

Among the catalog, one physics-based brawler stands out: Stickman Fighter Epic Battle has racked up more than ten million organic installs on Google Play and the App Store, proof that tight file sizes and quick-hit gameplay can still capture the world’s attention.

Advertising now supplies over half of Playtouch’s income, revenue that pays salaries and bankrolls R&D for the studio’s next titles.

The effect shows up not just on balance sheets but in unexpected moments of fan gratitude: one player even mailed an entire box of chocolates to thank the developers for all the free entertainment the studio gave them.

Looking ahead, Playtouch’s north star remains unchanged: to make a single HTML5 build that feels native on any screen — whether it be mobile, PC, smart TV, even in-flight systems.

"With ad revenue covering the essentials, the studio can keep hiring, experimenting, and, most importantly, let millions of players experience the magic of Playtouch."