Why RUN
Discover why Pany Haritatos built RUN: a platform empowering independent creators with AI-powered tools to build, distribute, and monetize games and interactive content faster than ever before.
By Pany Haritatos · June 1, 2026
Why We Built RUN
I am Pany Haritatos, CEO and founder of Series, the company building the RUN platform. Most people know me from my time working as Head of Games at Snap, or running Kongregate, but few know that I started my career as an independent game developer. Like most indie creators, I didn’t want to go the traditional path and become a small cog in the giant wheel of game development churning out reskins of the same widget each year without end. I was poor, but I had ambition, time, and a desire to make interesting products with a point of view. Most importantly, I felt the need to chart my own course, which, after a LOT of hard work and a fair amount of personal sacrifice, resulted in some great outcomes for me personally (with the sale of my first company to Zynga and my second to Kongregate).
But, before that, back when I was a starving indie decades ago, I had more ideas than resources. There was never enough time, users, or money. Every project was an exercise in resourceful thinking, problem-solving, and resilience. Every day was a challenge in overcoming the multi-functional complexity of game making on razor-thin budgets, made worse by the need to build everything from scratch. This is what drew me to my ultimate calling. Once I “became successful” (whatever that means 🙂), I devoted my career to helping independent developers overcome those challenges. That’s why I started the publishing program at Kongregate and took over the company & platform, why I became a gaming investor, and why I took the job as Head of Games at Snap.
I feel a kinship with independent creators, which is why I love working with them, but I also believe that an industry without innovation is one that will ultimately fail. Innovation has always come from, and will always come from, independent creators. They are the lifeblood of our industry. They are the ones willing to take risks, experiment with new ideas, challenge the status quo, and open up new audiences and platforms. Every major franchise hit, even from large companies, can trace its lineage back to an innovation that stemmed from a small team that, despite ALL the odds, overcame insurmountable obstacles to deliver a breakthrough innovation that rewrote the rules of the game.
Unfortunately, creative industries follow a very predictable cyclical pattern. Those innovations get copied, commercialized, and expanded, and the very creators who pioneered those innovations are frequently squeezed out in the process. Production costs rise, distribution becomes concentrated, and the advantages shift toward larger incumbents. The barriers to entry get higher, the risks get larger, and the incentives increasingly favor optimization over innovation. What starts as a vibrant, creator-driven ecosystem often becomes a red ocean dominated by a handful of companies competing over increasingly similar products. The cycle has repeated through every innovation we’ve seen in mechanics, genre, platform, distribution, and monetization.
The game industry has gone through a reckoning these last few years. We’re watching a system that built steep obstacles to innovation, that concentrated all efforts on maintaining the status quo, crumble due to uninteresting products designed by committees, and built to minimize risk with escalating budgets and development timelines.
It’s also never been harder to challenge the status quo. Budgets are through the roof as players expect bigger and better games with more content than ever before. Players want free games with deep service-driven economies that afford hours of play without spending a dollar. And distribution is more challenging than ever when you’re competing with billion-dollar companies with hundreds of millions in marketing capital optimizing single-point margin gains on complex multi-channel user acquisition machines.
It’s easy to see why independent creators are struggling to survive in this challenging environment.
However, we’re at the tipping point of a massive change in the way games & entertainment are made, served and distributed. The technology paradigm shift enabled by generative AI is leveling the playfield in a way that I haven’t seen since I first got into game development over 25 years ago. Embracing innovation in creation, distribution, and servicing is giving small teams superpowers, enabling them to move faster, experiment more freely, and bring ideas to market that would have required far larger organizations only a few years ago. The advantage is already shifting back toward creativity, agility, and originality.
But it’s still difficult to wield all these powerful new technologies, and there’s a danger that big companies will figure out how to optimize them before the independent creators do. And that's why we built RUN: to level the playing field.
RUN was built by a team of expert game makers with billions in revenue building games “the old way” with the singular purpose of disrupting the status quo. It has been built from the ground up to give independent creators access to cutting edge technology for building, distributing and servicing your games. We clearly see the new paradigm in interactive entertainment and we’ve built the technology platform to enable every innovative creator to be at the forefront of that revolution.
With RUN, a solo creator can build their own movie, show, interactive novel, game, or more, in just a few hours and use best-in-class tools to build, distribute, and monetize that content on every major consumer platform.
We are SO EXCITED to announce that RUN will be leaving soft launch later this month with our global launch. We have many new exciting announcements in store, including details about the RUN Fund, which will provide over $1m in funding for innovative projects on the RUN platform. For now, we hope you’ll sign up for our upcoming Idle Jam, join our Discord, or check out our Studio or CLI products to help familiarize yourself with all the powerful tools the RUN platform has to offer.
We can’t wait to see what you build!
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