If you sit down for an ice-cold Peroni with Alexis Cretton, you will learn more about the gaming industry than you ever will from hours of watching Twitch streamers do their thing. As a matter of fact, you could learn more about Twitch streamers talking to him than spending hours watching them do their thing.
The Senior Community Developer at Ubisoft Singapore has spent over a decade in the gaming industry working closely with gamers and gaming content creators, starting as a Community Manager at Frogster (known for their 2009 hit Runes of Magic) in Berlin.
Alexis came from a small town in France but, with a healthy intellectual curiousity, he wanted to see the larger world. “I left home in 2012 and moved to Berlin to join a company called Frogstar Online Gaming, which has since been bought over by Gameforge,” he tells Augustman. “It was super exciting and scary, leaving a small town in the French Alps where I grew up, for a massive city in Germany.”
It was a challenging move, to say the least, but it did teach him a lot about resilience and adapting to another country – something he would apply when he made the decision to come to our shores.
“A year after joining Frogstar, I moved back to France to work for Wargaming in Paris and that’s where things really got serious for me.”
He explains: “At Wargaming, I spearheaded a programme to better collaborate with our community leaders and content creators, to bridge the gap between Devs (game developers) and the gaming community.”
This would be a cornerstone of his career, and where he developed an underappreciated skill in the gaming industry — the ability to build communities and connect the various internal and external stakeholders of a video game company. Alexis spent six years in Wargaming, working his way up to Community Team Lead. When an opportunity came from gaming giants Ubisoft to lead the Community Development team in Singapore, Alexis jumped at it, revisiting the thirst for adventure and intellectual curiousity that lured him out of France in the first place. This time, however, he was leaving Europe altogether, but just like the protagonists of his favourite video games, Alexis wasn’t one to ignore the call to adventure.
At Ubisoft Singapore, he was at the heart of community outreach and development for one of its most anticipated releases – Skull and Bones.
“I spearheaded the first ‘Insider Programme’ at Ubisoft and built a community from scratch before the game is released,” he explains. “I was inspired by games released in early access. The idea was to invite hardcore fans and players to play our game before everyone elese, and help us better understand what works and what doesn’t through player feedback and data.”
His brainchild was a veritable success. “The programme started back in 2021 with around 50 guests and grew to more than 7,000 by the time the game launched in 2024.”
Skull and Bones received decent reviews from the gaming community, who expect it to improve with upcoming content updates.
It is worth noting that Alexis isn’t just adept at building communities of external stakeholders. He says: “This is something I always put a lot of my efforts and focus on — identifying leaders within the community and bringing them closer to the Devs, so their voices could be heard and games can be improved based on direct player feedback.
“I also worked a lot during COVID on buiding a community within the studio — since we weren’t able to meet face-to-face, communication was a challenge so I organised regular internal livestreams for Devs and designers to present their work to the entire team. It was also a way for me to build up our streaming studio capacities at Ubisoft Singapore, which then allowed us to go live, stream the game, and have direct and transparent communication from the Devs to our players when the game was released.”
It is the kind of foresight and creativity that has seen his reputation within the gaming industry steadily grow, and pushed us to select him as one of our August Men of Tomorrow.
