Nitish Mittersain started Nazara Technologies in 1999. On 1 September he gives up the chief executive’s job for the second time, to a man whose company Nazara is in the middle of buying for $303 million.
Both facts were announced on 3 August, alongside a quarter in which Nazara lost money. They are not three separate items of news. They are one transaction reported in three parts.
The chief executive arrived with the deal
Raymond Albaladejo Stauffer founded Bluetile, previously Playvalve, and BestPlay, mobile publishing businesses run out of Barcelona. Nazara agreed to acquire them and in the same announcement restructured the deal into $303 million of cash, dropping the share component. Stauffer becomes chief executive of the acquirer from 1 September, subject to regulatory approvals.
Nazara’s own release says Bluetile produced ₹254 crore of EBITDA in CY25 with a team of 65. That figure comes from the company and has been repeated across the trade press without independent verification. Mittersain’s welcome note contained the tell: “Having worked closely with him over the past year, I believe his founder mindset, global operating experience and capabilities across gaming, AI, product and data make him the right leader for Nazara’s next phase.” The past year is the year of the deal.
Four chief executives in eleven years
Mittersain ran Nazara from 2000 to 2015, then handed over to Manish Agarwal, formerly of Reliance Games, and became joint managing director. Agarwal resigned in October 2022. Mittersain took the job back that December and posted, “I’m back as #Nazara CEO from today.”
He now presents that return as a planned interval rather than a rescue. “I returned for a second stint with a clear objective: strengthen Nazara, sharpen our identity as a gaming company, prepare it for global growth and, at the right time, once again bring in the right CEO.” He has the numbers to support it. Revenue over that stint rose from ₹1,091 crore in FY23 to ₹1,829 crore in FY26, EBITDA from about ₹110 crore to ₹255 crore, and the company raised more than ₹1,600 crore of growth capital. He stays on as founder and managing director.
Read one way, that is a founder who knows what he is good at and has now hired around it twice. Read another, it is a listed company that has cycled founder, outsider, founder, outsider in eleven years, and has sourced its outsider from its own acquisition pipeline rather than a search.
What the buying has cost
Nazara has assembled itself by purchase: Nodwin, Sportskeeda, Kiddopia, WildWorks, Next Wave Multimedia, Datawrkz, Curve Games and more. The most expensive lesson is recent. After India’s ban on real-money gaming, Nazara cut the carrying value of its investment in Moonshine Technologies, which runs PokerBaazi, to ₹96.53 crore, booking a ₹914.7 crore impairment in the quarter to September 2025. Mittersain called it a one-time item that did “not impact operating cash flows or the momentum of our core business.”
Mittersain’s own farewell note was more candid than the filing. “Not every decision worked exactly as planned,” he wrote. “We navigated significant industry turbulence, some investments took longer to mature and a few integrations proved more challenging than expected.” That last clause is the whole argument for hiring an operator.
The quarter announced with the appointment showed revenue from operations of ₹428.77 crore, down 14% from ₹498.77 crore, which Nazara attributes to deconsolidating Nodwin and which grows about 9% on a like-for-like basis. The consolidated net loss was ₹82.47 crore, against a profit of ₹51.34 crore a year earlier, with further impairment from the gaming ban inside it.
The market did not flinch. The stock rose 3.4% to ₹351.10 on the day and has gained 25% in 2026. Investors have decided the buying is the business. Stauffer has been hired to make the things already bought work, which is the one capability a roll-up cannot acquire.
Sources
- The Economic Times, on the Q1 FY27 loss and the leadership change, 3 August 2026
- Moneycontrol, on Stauffer and Bluetile, 4 August 2026
- Storyboard18, on the appointment and the quarter, 4 August 2026
- Adgully, on the Bluetile EBITDA figure and Stauffer’s brief, 4 August 2026
- MediaNews4U, carrying Mittersain’s own account of his second stint, 4 August 2026
- Business Standard, on the ₹914.7 crore Moonshine impairment, 12 November 2025
- Moneycontrol, on the Q1 FY27 numbers, 4 August 2026
- CNBC-TV18, on the share price reaction on the day of the announcement, 4 August 2026
