Studio
+44 20 7924 0137 [email protected]12 Clerkenwell Road, London EC1M 5PQ, United Kingdom
Monday to Friday, 9:00 AM – 6:00 PM
London · App and game studio
Riverstone Holdings is a London-based app and game development studio. The studio is deliberately small, and that is a decision rather than a stage we are passing through.
Where the studio came from
The studio grew out of a mix of mobile app work and game production. Some of the founders came from app teams shipping consumer products, some from small game projects where one person did four jobs. What tied it together was an interest in products that have to stand on their own after launch rather than impress a slide deck.
That mix shows up in how we work. We bring the release discipline of app development into game production, and the playfulness of games into how we design app interactions. It is not a marketing angle; it is just what happens when both kinds of project sit in the same room.
We have been at the London address long enough that the coffee place downstairs knows the order.
App teams
iOS, Android, consumer products — release first.
Game teams
Small, cross-role production — play first.
One room
No handoff theatre — same desk.
Both kinds of project share the same file tree, the same sprint board, and the same person joining the review.
How the team is set up
A small studio means the person who scopes a project is often the person who writes the code. Decisions come back in hours, not steering meetings. Nothing gets lost in a handover that never needed to happen.
The tradeoff is honest: we cannot staff a hundred-person project. When a brief needs that level, we say so early and, if it helps, point to the studios that do it well. There are strong mid-sized teams across the UK; Merseyside has a cluster of them and Guildford has its own heritage.
What we can do is take a project from concept to a live build with a team you know by name. That model fits some clients and not others.
When a brief outgrows that, we say it in the first reply — usually with a shortlist of mid-sized UK teams who do that work better than we would.
How we decide what to take on
We turn down work when the fit is wrong and we try to do it in the first reply rather than after a discovery call. The projects we are right for tend to share three things: a clear problem to solve, a client who wants to be in the room during the build, and a budget that matches the scope.
A good fit
Not our fit
We also say no to projects where the client wants to hand over the concept and hear nothing until launch. That model exists and other studios do it well; it just is not how we work.
Working principles we hold to
01
Your team keeps the repository, the store accounts, and the documentation. Nothing about the build lives in a place you cannot open the day after we finish — the code, the assets, the branching history, and the release pipeline all belong to you from day one.
02
Scope gets written before code does. What is on the build, what is out, and how a change gets agreed are all in writing while the work is still a shape rather than a decision. Discovery weeks are cheap; rewrites are not.
03
Launch week is part of the build, not a separate contract. The team that wrote the code is on the line the week the store listing goes live, the first support tickets come in, and the server starts wobbling under the first real traffic.
We could go on, but those three have done most of the work in our own experience. Clients have told us the repo commitment is unusual enough to be worth stating explicitly, which is why it appears on every page of this site.
The market we work in
The UK app and game development market is crowded and mostly service-led. That is not a complaint; it is just the shape of the industry. Knowing what other UK studios do well is a useful check on our own work.
Small studios
Product studios like BuildApps who work across healthcare, education, and the public sector show how a small, senior team can own a whole product line.
Mid-sized teams
There is room for mid-sized teams like Lucid Games on the Merseyside side, whose live-ops scale sits well past what a small shop can staff.
Specialist shops
Ocean View Games focuses on Unity work for iOS and Android, and Via Creative handles bespoke mobile app development for clients who want custom work rather than templates.
Studio desk, Clerkenwell — where the studio grows only when there is a reason.
The studio grows only when there is a reason. Adding a person mid-project is fine; adding three for the sake of a slide is not. We expect the shape of the business to stay close to what it is now: small, senior, and focused on projects that fit the model.
If that changes, it will be because a particular kind of project we love needs more hands, not because a growth target says so. Working on games and apps we would actually use is the reason most of us are here.
In the margin
Some projects set a bar for the whole industry and it is fine to say so. Baldur's Gate 3 raised expectations for what branching choice and systemic design can deliver, and that bar sits in the back of the head for any project that touches narrative systems. Media Molecule has spent years turning player-made content into a design language, which is a different kind of ambition.
On the app side, the bar is set differently. Users compare your product to the best app on their home screen, and they do not care that you have a small team. That is the real opponent, and it is worth being honest about.
What the first conversation looks like
A first call with us is usually thirty minutes and starts with your project, not our credentials. By the end we can usually say whether we are a fit and what the next step would be.
If the answer is yes, the next step is usually a scoping week. If the answer is no, you get a short reply that says why and, where we can, a suggestion of what kind of team would suit. That is the whole studio in one paragraph.
