For the past two years, our studio has transitioned from an environment where the majority of the employees worked out of our office in Amsterdam into a remote-working culture where most of the employees work from home. The shift did not come easy, and this blog describes the journey we have made and why it was important for us.
Author: Kim Nordstrom, CEO
When I joined PP (short for PLAYERUNKNOWN Productions) in October 2023, the studio had about 30 employees, and we were aiming to hire another 20 people. The majority of the existing employees (about 20 people) at that point were locally employed in the Netherlands and came into the office two days per week. The remaining employees were spread out across Europe and rarely visited the office.
Back then, recruitment was already in full swing, and the data was clear; it was much harder to find senior people within the Netherlands compared to scouting across all of Europe. Although my knee-jerk reaction when joining the studio was to start promoting everyone to be at the office more often, it was quite clear with the recruitment data on hand - that it wasn’t going to work.
So... We Realized We Had to Rethink How We Worked
If we wanted to hire senior talent at the quality level we aimed for, we needed to hire across all of Europe, which meant the majority of our employees would eventually be based outside of the Netherlands. Therefore, we had to start embracing a remote-working culture.
All of us had worked our whole professional lives in an office, five days per week (except during Covid), and were used to having people around. Across the leadership, there was very little experience in running a remote-working studio.
We started making phone calls to people who had experience of running remote-working games studios. Although there was some good advice, there wasn’t a solution that we could build on. Most of the companies we talked to had either worked remotely from the very beginning or had chosen to bring employees back to the office.
It soon became clear that we needed to solve this problem ourselves.
The Solution Was Already in Our Organisation
Our CTO, Laurent Gorga, joined PP a few months before me as a Technical Director and came with extensive experience not only technically but also organisationally. Back then, he started to shift the studio toward working in six-week milestones. Each milestone would consist of three sprints of two weeks each to provide more granularity. All teams at PP started working according to this.
Each milestone would start with intensive planning per team on what was to be achieved in the coming six weeks and would end with reviews and a celebration on what had been done. Based on his long experience, Laurent knew that it was overwhelming for teams in general to do proper planning, deliver efficiently, and have time to review and reflect within the milestone, so to solve that, he decided to add a seventh week after each milestone period, and called it the "planning week". This week would give the necessary time for the teams to start and complete each milestone with room for discussions, housekeeping, and reflections. This seventh week, our planning week, would eventually become our solution to how we started to work remotely.
During the planning week, we asked our employees not to do their ordinary work but to instead focus on interacting with each other. On top of the expected work of planning each milestone, the planning week gave employees dedicated and encouraged time for the human factor, such as taking walks together during 1:1s, getting to know one another as individuals, and building trust while having fun together, playing board games or enjoying a couple of beers.
Decision Made: Shift Into a Remote-Working Culture
At the beginning of 2024, we had already completed a few milestones and planning weeks, so we knew that this setup worked in general and was valued by most. We decided to double down and agreed to formally build our remote-working culture around our planning week.
The decision and change itself was straightforward: we made it mandatory for all employees to be at the office for three days during the planning week every seventh week.
For the locally employed people, we replaced the requirement of coming to the office twice per week with three days every seventh week. For our remote employees, we would pay for flights and hotels for them to fly to Amsterdam.
With this, we started our transition towards a remote-working culture.
Fast-forward: 20 Months and 13 Milestones Later
As a studio, we have now delivered 12 milestones and hosted the same amount of planning weeks.
First of all, is the setup perfect? No.
Did we find a model that solved most of the problems around how we work? Yes.
We now know that the cadence of the seven-week cycle for the milestone works well. In December 2024, we released (and maintained since) our tech demo Preface, based on our own technology, Melba. Prologue was released in Open Beta in August 2025. In the meantime, the studio grew from 30 people to 65, with employees across 18 different countries.
The majority of the employees show up at the office every seventh week, excited and prepared, to roll up their sleeves for three days of back-to-back interactions and discussions. Nowadays, the planning week happens naturally, with the majority of the employees feeling the value for themselves.
Everyone knows when they will get to meet up face to face and often look forward to it, but they are also quite happy to go back home afterwards, as it’s a dense week. The way we measure success is when people say, "I am tired, but this was a good week, again!"
We Went All-in on Planning Week
There is minimal communication during the first six weeks of each milestone by design. Teams have their own communication channels, and the studio uses Slack and Discord when needed, but in general, there are no unnecessary meetings. Instead, we focus on getting maximum value from our three days during the planning week.
On average, the week looks something like this:
Monday evening: employees fly into Amsterdam
Tuesday: mainly dedicated to reviewing and reflecting on the previous milestone. What went well, what could have been better, and how it impacts the planning for the next milestone. We often gather at the office for board games and pizza after the day is over.
Wednesday: planning for the next milestone begins with workshops, team meetings, in-person 1:1s. In the evening, teams usually break out for individual dinners.
Thursday: finalises the planning as the studio comes together to review the achievements from the previous milestone and to share upcoming plans. There are studio-wide presentations on strategy, key decisions, marketing, and HR. The day ends with pizza at the office, and many of the remote employees fly back home.
This setup allows us to achieve two very important things:
We consistently evaluate our own performance of the past milestone (which is six weeks) and understand what we achieved compared to what we planned during the past planning week. And we get to do it together, in person, at the office. This gives us an understanding of our ability to deliver across teams as well as within each team, which is also an important input for planning the next milestone.
We have scheduled time to meet in person and interact. We are humans and need to socialise, discuss, and be creative together in person. Working remotely gives everyone the flexibility to plan their days and weeks individually, and with the planning week we get these three dedicated days for everyone to work IRL to build relationships and trust. Everyone in the studio knows that, "I will see you in person within six weeks again".
The beauty of the cycle and cadence that comes with the milestone is that we can always experiment, and we know within a milestone if it works or not. We often find ourselves saying, “let’s try it out the next milestone and see how it goes”. This takes away a lot of pressure from the teams to get things right immediately and allows us to try more.
The Devil Is in the Details
We built our whole yearly plan on this seven-week cycle, primarily to solve how we work remotely, but also because all non-game team activities across the studio are now connected to this. Leadership training now happens on-site during the planning week. We even have extra staff coming in, taking care of the office every planning week, making sure that toilet paper doesn’t run out.
Here are a few examples of the many things we have optimized because of the cycle:
All employees gather around a Studio Update during the planning week to get an update on company-wide activities, including staffing/recruitment updates, results of engagement surveys, and cool marketing activities. The cadence ensures that everyone gets a frequent update on what’s going on in the company and an opportunity to discuss topics face-to-face.
We connected all non-gaming activities, such as engagement surveys, reviews, leadership training, recruitment (on-site interviews), summer parties, and office related activities, to the milestone cycle and planning week, creating one company-wide calendar. Everyone has a good understanding of what's planned over the year and why.
With over 700 nights booked at hotels, we negotiated good rates at a nearby hotel. Having everyone stay in the same place increased interactions, such as having breakfast together and grabbing a few beers in the lobby before going to bed.
Families now know exactly when work travels happens, making it easier to plan vacations (hint: not during the planning week). We doubled down on VPN tools, remote-desktop solutions, and faster internet to make sure everyone can work with as little interruptions as possible.
For the planning week itself, just the fact that people happily meet up for breakfast at the hotel, stay at the office to play board games, or have a few beers in the lobby in the evening makes it clear that the planning week is working out well.
But Wait, There Is More: Sprints Are Also Divided into Synchronization and Execution Weeks
Throughout the milestones, there have been further developments for the teams to know when to focus on delivery and when to focus on communication. Each milestone contains three sprints that are two weeks long. Each week in a sprint now has a dedicated purpose:
We call the first week of the sprint the Synchronization week. This week is where all meetings should happen, not only inside of the team but also across teams. HR topics like recruitment and training should happen during this week. Communication between teams and topics related to a discipline (art, tech, design, and more) should also take place this week.
The second week of the sprint is called: the Execution week. The goal of this week is to minimize all interactions across the studio and allow the teams to focus on execution. No HR activities are allowed, nor large internal studio-wide meetings, or similar activities. They will have to wait until the next week in the sprint or until the end of the milestone.
We Still Have Quite a Bit to Improve On
There are still many things that don’t work and need to be improved. Teams have become much better at sharing progress and results on Slack, but we need to improve further to encourage experts across the studio to contribute more. Documentation remains a challenge, we are not good enough at documenting decisions or locating the documentation we have.
It might sound like a small thing, but we need a more flexible office layout, as our aim is to grow the studio beyond 100 employees. Right now, the office sits nearly empty for six weeks and is crowded for one. Yet it's still arranged in way that assumes the teams would be there five days a week. Maybe desks on wheels are the solution here...
This Is Our Culture Now!
We managed to build a habit around this loop with the milestone cycle and planning week. After 13 times, it now flows naturally. Every new employee gets pulled in, as planning week is the perfect information-and-social-overload week for them to start. A bit like a punch-in-the-face, but in a good way.
It’s still early days for our studio, but we will continue to build on this. This is how we operate now, our culture. It guides us on when to meet virtually and when not to, when to inform and when not to, and how to build trust across the studio.