Why I'm Building ButterStack: I've Seen This Problem From Every Side of the Stack

Hey 👋, I’m Kevin.

I’ve spent more than twenty years in and around games technology: building the tools studios use, representing those tools in the field, and helping the world’s biggest cloud get into the hands of game developers. I’ve sat on almost every side of the game-dev stack, and from every seat I kept seeing the same problem.

A Career Spent Inside the Pipeline

I started at IGT (International Game Technology), where I spent over twelve years building video-slot games on embedded systems, then building the engines and tools the studio ran on, and eventually managing the engineering teams that shipped 50+ games a year. When you’re responsible for the tooling behind that kind of output, you learn fast that the bottleneck is almost never the creative work. It’s the pipeline: the builds, the assets, the hand-offs, the “who changed what and why.”

From there I went to Unity Technologies as a Lead Field Engineer, embedded with studios from first inquiry through adoption, helping them build great games and navigate the organizational change that new tooling demands.

Then I spent five years at Amazon Game Tech. I worked AWS for game studios, first as a Solutions Architect and Technical Evangelist for Lumberyard, GameLift, and GameSparks, then running partner programs as a Senior Partner Solutions Architect and Partner Marketing Manager through the AWS Partner Network. That’s the exact rail ButterStack is building on today. I even wrote, years ago, about centralizing game production assets on AWS with Perforce Helix Core, the same Perforce-on-cloud problem ButterStack now solves end-to-end. I was early to a thesis I’m now building a company around.

More recently I led Solutions Architecture at Forte and Pragma (backend platforms for game studios), and in 2024 founded ChiefTechAdvisor, advising games-industry solution providers on aligning their business and technology strategy.

The Gap I Kept Seeing

Engine vendor, cloud partner, consultant: the seat changed, the problem didn’t. Studios are brilliant at making games and consistently underserved when it comes to operating the production pipeline behind them.

The big studios can paper over it by hiring internal tools teams. Everyone else (the 10-to-50-person studios doing remarkable work) is duct-taping Perforce, Jenkins, Jira, Steam, and an engine together by hand, with no unified view of any of it. I watched studio after studio reinvent the same integrations, fight the same build fires, and fly blind on the same questions: Who broke the build? Where’s this asset in the approval flow? Is our pipeline actually healthy?

I believe the magic happens where business and technology intersect, and that’s been the throughline of my whole career in Solutions Architecture. ButterStack lives exactly there: turning the messy, invisible operational layer of game development into something a studio can finally see, run, and trust.

Where I Come In

Ryan built Perforce’s cloud product and knows the source-of-truth side cold. My side is the rest of the stack and the business around it: partnerships with AWS and Perforce, go-to-market, pricing, and the corporate foundation. Between us we’ve worked both ends of the exact pipeline ButterStack unifies, and I’ve spent my career on the partner and solutions-architecture rails we’re now using to bring it to studios.

I hold an MBA from the University of Nevada, Reno and a BS in Computer Systems Engineering Technology from the Oregon Institute of Technology, and I’m a named inventor on three patents, including one for testing and delivery of game design assets in a service-provider environment, which, looking back, was ButterStack-shaped long before ButterStack existed.

Let’s Connect

I love talking about game-development pipelines, partner ecosystems, and how studios actually buy and adopt tools. If you’re wrestling with pipeline visibility, Perforce-on-cloud, or scaling a studio’s operations, I’d genuinely like to hear about it.

Thanks!
Kevin Ashman
President of ButterStack

Want to see what pipeline observability looks like? Try ButterStack free and connect your first integration in minutes.

Or just email me at: kevin@butterstack.com.