[Industry news] Room 8 Group appoints Juanita Draude as Chief Executive Officer

This is a press release posted in addition to our usual editorial content.

Room 8 Group, a leading external game development partner, has today announced the appointment of Juanita Draude as Chief Executive Officer, marking the next phase of the company’s growth and evolution.

Draude joins Room 8 Group following Anna Kozlova’s seven years at the helm, during which the company transformed into a global external development partner.

Juanita Draude brings over 20 years of experience across media, technology, and entertainment, with leadership roles at Monks, Publicis Groupe, the NBA, and NBC Universal. She has a strong track record in driving commercial growth, leading AI-aided transformation, and scaling global operations.

Her appointment reflects Room 8 Group’s continued focus on strengthening its position as a tech-driven game development partner, combining deep production expertise with advanced technology.

“I’m excited to step into this role at such an important moment for both Room 8 Group and the industry as a whole. Games today are built through increasingly complex, cross-disciplinary collaboration, and our focus is on evolving Room 8 Group into a truly integrated, technology-driven partner that can support developers and publishers across the full production lifecycle.

My experience in media, entertainment, and advertising reinforces the importance of building trusted long-term partnerships around great audience experiences—and that’s exactly the direction we will continue to strengthen at Room 8 Group.”

Juanita Draude, CEO Room 8 Group

“Juanita’s leadership approach strongly aligns with the long-term transformation Room 8 Group has been driving over the past several years: building a more integrated, technology-enabled development organization capable of supporting modern co-development at scale. Through this re-thinking of our organization and infrastructure Room 8 Group has evolved beyond traditional service delivery toward connected production ecosystems that combine creative, engineering, and operational expertise within a unified execution framework. As development cycles become more complex and partners look for greater predictability and integration, that operational maturity becomes increasingly strategic for our key partners.”

Julien Proux, Chief Content Officer at Room 8 Group

Room 8 Group continues to operate with the same strategic focus, delivering high-quality game development services to partners worldwide. The company remains committed to combining production excellence with advanced technology to support the evolving needs of the games industry.