Last Monday, I attended an event by Xsolla in Tel Aviv.
At first, it felt like another gaming industry gathering.
But this wasn’t another standard networking event.
It was the announcement of something much bigger.
A new hub built specifically for people in the gaming industry. A place designed for thinking, collaborating, meeting people from across the industry, and creating new ideas together.
And according to the vision presented during the event:
This is only the beginning…
The Tel Aviv location is the first gaming hub of its kind created by Xsolla, with plans to open more spaces like this around the world in the future.
The space itself includes gaming rooms where developers can test games, meeting rooms for small teams, quiet working areas, shared workspaces, and even a dedicated podcast room.
During the event, I had the opportunity to sit down with Nikita Sherman,
I had the opportunity to sit down with Nikita Sherman, SVP Business Development Mediterranean at Xsolla, who leads the company’s partnerships, ecosystem growth, and industry initiatives across the region.
What surprised me wasn’t the business side.
It was the philosophy.
At one point during our conversation, Nikita said:
“Big ideas don’t appear during conference speaking sessions.”
And then followed with:
“You come up with these ideas when you meet a like-minded person.”
That sentence stayed with me.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized something:
The gaming industry has become incredibly connected digitally, and sometimes incredibly disconnected physically.
We have Discord, We have Slack, We have LinkedIn, We have Zoom.
We have endless ways to communicate.
But somewhere along the way, we lost something.
We lost LAN parties.
We lost many of those random conversations that eventually become friendships, projects, partnerships, or sometimes even entire careers.
Ironically, Nikita himself talked about exactly this feeling.
And suddenly, the entire idea behind this place made complete sense.
Because this place isn’t supposed to feel like an office.
It’s supposed to feel like home.
During our conversation, Nikita described the vision like this:
“We decided to build a place where people from the industry come together to feel at home.”
And perhaps the most interesting part:
This place isn’t only for developers.
Not only for startups, Not only for publishers, Not only for investors.
The vision is to create a place where the entire gaming industry comes together.
Developers meet investors, Publishers meet journalists, Founders meet creators. Indie developers meet future partners.
As someone who constantly meets studios, publishers, and gaming companies, especially while preparing for events like Gamescom, this idea resonated with me more than I expected.
Because gaming was never really only about platforms, Or monetization, Or business models.
Even though during our conversation Nikita explained how more developers are moving toward direct relationships with players and how entire ecosystems are now being built around that idea.
At its core:
Gaming has always been about people.
Another sentence from our conversation captured it perfectly:
“We care about the industry. Because when the industry grows, we grow.”
And maybe that’s the entire point.
Building a relationship engine.
Creating a place where people simply want to stay.
So maybe the real question isn’t:
What does the gaming industry need right now?
Maybe the better question is:
How do we create more places where great ideas can happen accidentally?