Exploding Kittens has named chief commercial officer Joeri Hoste as its new head of studio, with the long-time game industry exec eyeing further expansion of the company’s namesake hit into a “long-lasting evergreen brand” beyond its big-selling card game.

Hoste joined Exploding Kittens to lead its international business in 2020, following multi-year stints at companies including Hong Kong based board game publisher and manufacturer Ooba Games, toy company BOTI and trading card and collectibles specialist Upper Deck.

He takes the head of studio role at the Asmodee-owned business as former Exploding Kittens CEO Carly McGinnis was named head of the parent company’s global publishing operation last month.

Hoste said in a LinkedIn post that the past six years at Exploding Kittens had been the most rewarding of his career, adding that he was “ecstatic and humbled” to take responsibility for leading the company into the next stage of its development.

He said, “We’ll continue our mission of making great games and creating experiences that bring people together. Exploding Kittens is the game that built its namesake company, and our next challenge will be to develop the IP into a long-lasting evergreen brand that outgrows its original format.

“Exploding Kittens is unique within Asmodee as we combine deep commercial mass market expertise with publishing quirky and irreverent games that disrupt the games category.

“We did not get here by blending in. We succeed because of the talented team that’s willing to be different.”

Exploding Kittens has been a huge commercial success in the wake of its debut title raising almost $8.8m on Kickstarter in 2015.

Last year Exploding Kittens revealed it had sold more than 60 million games as it marked a decade in business – with the company’s growth having already extended well beyond the tabletop.

That has included a partnership with Netflix which expanded the property into mobile gaming and an animated series.

Asmodee bought a 55% majority stake in Exploding Kittens at the end of 2021, and exercised its option to purchase the remaining 45% minority stake last year.

Exploding Kittens has continued to stand out within Asmodee’s portfolio during a difficult period for parts of the US board game market.

Asmodee CEO Thomas Koegler singled the company out last November as a particularly strong performer amid economic uncertainty caused by rising prices and US tariffs, adding that US consumers were favouring lower-priced games. Asmodee again highlighted strong Exploding Kittens growth while discussing a 23% year-on-year fall in its US quarterly sales earlier this year.

The promotion comes as Asmodee is making a wider push into social and party games – a category where Exploding Kittens has been one of its strongest brands.

In March the company agreed to pay up to €250m for French social and party game publisher ATM Gaming, with Koegler saying the acquisition would combine ATM’s strength in Europe with Exploding Kittens’ strong position in the US. Asmodee has said it expects the social games category to grow at between 4% and 8% annually between 2025 and 2030, compared with about 4% for the broader board games market.

It also launched US party game studio Moodbox Games last year, a move de Barros described at the time as strengthening Asmodee’s presence in a category where Exploding Kittens and Zygomatic were already seeing strong success.

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Tabletop game design pioneer Steve Jackson has ended a 17-month return running his namesake games company, with new CEO Sabrina Gonzalez taking charge of a business with years of falling revenue as well as a run of promising crowdfunding successes.

Jackson will remain president of the company he founded in 1980, but will refocus his attention on game design and development, with managing editor Allison Page promoted to COO.

He had previously stepped back from the day-to-day running of Steve Jackson Games in 2014, when long-time COO Phil Reed became CEO, allowing Jackson to devote more of his attention to game development.

Reed was succeeded by TurboDork CEO and current GAMA president Meredith Placko in 2023, but Jackson returned to direct control of the business in April last year following her unexpected resignation.

Jackson’s return as CEO in 2024 was not presented as a permanent appointment, with him saying in the wake of her departure that her direct reports would report to him while he “figured out a plan”.

Gonzalez has been with SJ Games since 2013 as a production artist and production manager, apart from a brief period away from the company working for toy and game manufacturer Grand Prix International – and has been a member of the board of directors since 2021.

She said of her vision for the business, “As a general goal, I’d like us to continue to grow. We weathered the pandemic and pivoted project plans to address continually changing tariffs.

“The goal is always to make great games that people love. I want to continue developing new titles for future generations of gamers and also support (and sometimes update) the classics that our fans continue to request.”

New COO Page joined SJ Games as managing editor in 2023, having previously worked as executive artistic director of San Francisco comedy organisation Killing My Lobster. She also spent a year working as a narrative designer in the video game industry.

Page said, “I’m most excited to support Sabrina in her new role as CEO! We’ve always worked really well together and want the same things for SJ Games.

“I’m a problem solver, and I’m passionate about setting clear expectations. I’m excited to untangle whatever comes my way and ensure the team knows how to move forward and has what they need.”

The leadership change comes after what Jackson described in May as an “unusual and very awful” 2025 for the business, which has caused an ongoing delay in the company’s annual stakeholder report that Jackson has publicly posted since 2003.

He said on the company’s blog in May, “We made it through! But it’s not a story that fits well into the standard Stakeholder format. It took me a while to get up the nerve to start, and it has taken me longer to get it right. But I shall.”

SJ Games posted seven years of rising annual revenues from the mid-2000s to reach a record $8.8m in 2013, a year boosted by heavy demand for its Munchkin line of games – which accounted for more than 75% of its sales – and almost $1m from the Ogre Designer’s Edition Kickstarter.

Revenues have decline substantially since, however, falling about 2.5x from that peak to settle at around $3.5m across both 2023 and 2024 – the last years for which Steve Jackson has published the total – and bringing the annual total down to levels last seen back in 2010.

Jackson said in the executive summary in the 2023 report, “Cash flow was acceptable. It was not a profitable year, though. We have identified and dealt with some of the money-losing issues; others will be harder. We are working on it. (No fear; we have plenty of runway left. I just hate to use it.)”

He continued in the 2024 overview, “Cash flow was acceptable, but I don’t feel ‘prosperous’. This is not just us; individual game sales, industry-wide, were down at both the distribution and retail end, largely due to the glut of titles.”

Jackson added that year, “We are still working the problem, but we have less runway than we did last year! Cause for optimism: it was a rebuilding year and not expected to be good for cash, but thanks to your support for Munchkin Big Box it was better than we anticipated.”

Those challenges were exacerbated in 2025 by the impact of volatile US tariff policy, which included an unexpected “high five-figure” bill on its Munchkin Big Box after new tariffs were levied while the already-produced game was at sea.

The company subsequently raised some of its prices in response to tariffs, while uncertainty over overseas manufacturing led it to scrap the box and dice for RPG collection Dahlia’s Diversions for Peculiar Parties in favour of a rigid envelope, and shifting printing to the US before fully assembling the games on Jackson’s dining room table.

Jackson said in July that the company had received a partial rebate on its Munchkin Big Box tariff payment earlier this year, which it passed on to customers through a temporary discount on its web store Warehouse 23.

The BackerKit campaign for the Munchkin Big Box had been one of the company’s bright spots over the past couple of years, bringing in more than $1.3m from over 9,000 backers – a situation Jackson credited with making 2024 financially better than expected.

SJ Games followed that with a $370,000 BackerKit campaign for Munchkin Second Edition this year to coincide with the game’s 25th anniversary, and in recent years has extended out the game with Munchkin Shadowrun, Munchkin Vox Machina and multiple Warhammer-based releases, as well as several other expansions.

The company made a notable expansion itself in February last year, when it brought acclaimed indie RPG publisher Possum Creek Games into the business as an imprint.

It said at the time that the deal would allow Possum Creek, the publisher of Wanderhome and Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast, to retain full creative and editorial control over its titles, while “lending their talents to the SJ Games design and visual branding”.

Possum Creek editorial director Jay Dragon joined the SJ Games board of directors as part of the tie-up, and became its lead game designer, while Ruby Lavin became the company’s art director.

Since then Dragon’s TTRPG design Seven-Part Pact has raised more than $1m through a Kickstarter campaign, while SJ Games has also raised almost $600,000 across a pair of Kickstarters for the venerable Fighting Fantasy line of adventure gamebooks, having agreed a deal in 2024 to bring the UK-created titles back to the US for the first time in more than two decades.

Steve Jackson’s game design career dates back to the late 1970s, with his 1977 debut Ogre helping popularise the emerging microgame format of small, inexpensive wargames.

Within five years he had designed Car Wars and Illuminati, founded his own games company and been inducted into the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts & Design Hall of Fame in 1982 – all while still in his 20s.

He followed that with the Generic Universal RolePlaying System (GURPS) in 1986, which was his attempt to create a single roleplaying system capable of working across different settings and genres.

While not the first RPG to experiment with universal rules, GURPS helped popularise the concept and grew into a huge publishing line for Steve Jackson Games. By 2004 the company had released about 200 GURPS titles, with more than one million copies in print in English alone.

Jackson’s most visible modern design is Munchkin, which became the company’s biggest commercial success following its release in 2001. The game was inducted into the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts & Design Hall of Fame in 2013.

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