About – Mobile Game Doctor

About Mobile Game Doctor

Free-to-play game development and live operations are demanding, complicated businesses. Our dedicated domain experts help your team succeed with expert advice, guidance, training, and specialized skills honed through decades of hands-on experience.

Our Mission

There are so many smart people in the games industry. Mobile Game Doctor brings smart, experienced, and dedicated domain experts in the industry together into a community to share knowledge, collaborate on interesting projects, and build capable teams. Our love for games and our industry drives us to continue to learn and grow every day, even though we’ve been doing this for decades. Our clients tap into and become a part of that community, and we are united in our desire to make games better and to make better games.

Unmatched Expertise

Eastside Games has worked closely with Mobile Game Doctor on several projects over the past 3 years. We have worked with both the founders, and a selection of “Doctors” who have made critical contributions to both Trailer Park Boys: Greasy Money and The Goldbergs: Back to the 80s. MGD’s professional expertise is unmatched in the industry. We look forward to a continued partnership for years to come.

Jim Wagner

Director of Product, East Side Games

Mobile Game Doctors have partnered with dozens of game developers worldwide to help improve their games, teams, and processes. Our team members average more than 20 years of game industry and over a decade of practical free-to-play experience. We have worked with everyone from industry giants like King to tiny fiveperson indies, doing everything from hands-on design to mentorship and coaching to one-off game evaluations.

Amazing indies and giant publishers alike count on us to help them succeed, but no consulting firm lasts long without generating meaningful results. Need references? No problem! We are proud of our work, and stand behind it 100%.

In addition to our core team Mobile Game Doctor has a network of more than 40 seasoned experts from around the world with a huge range of experience related to the mobile game industry. We take on both unique challenges and common but tenacious barriers faced by many studios.

We’ve worked on more than 200 projects with more than 100 companies. Many are small-to-medium sized self-publishing development studios with one or two moderately successful titles that they want to scale. We also frequently help studios that are working towards launch, and work with developers in other countries bring their projects to market in the US.

Our projects most often involve:

Game design, monetization, or marketing audits.
Teaching best practices of live ops (Data literacy, A/B testing, iteration velocity improvement, etc.)
Helping their teams learn to understand player behavior, and designing improvements in customer-value-centric ways

Our Team

Dave Rohrl, Founder and Chairman

Dave Rohrl is Mobile Game Doctor’s Founder and Chairman, and provides strategic business and creative guidance to the company and assists on key accounts. Dave’s 28-year career in game design, production, and studio leadership included stops at Pogo, PopCap (where he was immortalized as Crazy Dave in Plants vs. Zombies), Zynga, and Playdom. Dave founded Mobile Game Doctor in 2014 to help struggling free-to-play developers solve hard creative, process, and business problems, and served as the company’s CEO until early 2021.

David Nixon, Senior Product Marketing Consultant

David Nixon is Mobile Game Doctor’s Chief Exectuive Officer and leads all MGD marketing-related initiatives, provides overall project coordination, and assists the consultants as needed. David is a 30+ year industry veteran with experience in game design, project management, strategic operations, publishing, portfolio management, and live operations.

Mike Kanarek, General Manager

Mike Kanarek has been working in product marketing for online, console, and mobile games for more than 10 years. He has a Masters of Business Administration from Babson College with a specialty in marketing. Mike has built teams for multi-million dollar projects and worked as a one man team to bring indie games to delighted audiences. Some of the work he’s most proud of includes Rock Band 3, Dance Central 2, Dungeons and Dragons Online, The Walking Dead: March to War, and Flippfly’s Race The Sun. Mike’s focus is on connecting the creative and branding aspects of marketing with data driven decision making.

Tadhg Kelly, Designer, Writer, Producer & Executive

Tadhg Kelly is a longtime game designer, producer, writer and executive with experience in most major platforms. He started his career in the UK in studios like Lionhead and Climax, as well as founding a startup and writing the game design blog What Games Are. Since 2013 Tadhg has lived and worked in Seattle, in both mobile and AR/VR, including launching some of the first games on Magic Leap. He now heads up operations and quality control at Mobile Game Doctor.