European Online Games Experts

ICO Partners Limited was founded in May 2008, and is currently based in Brighton, UK.

The Team
Thomas Bidaux started his professional career in online games more than ten years ago at France Telecom, within the GOA team. His department grew from a one-man team in charge of the first French MMORPG La 4ème Prophétie, to the European organisation in charge of the most successful MMORPG on the market at the time, Dark Age of Camelot.

In 2004, Thomas left France Telecom and Paris to set up the European subsidiary of the online game giant NCsoft in the UK. As Director of Development, he managed the team responsible for bringing several major MMOs to the European market, including Guild Wars and City of Heroes. As a participant in NCsoft's Global Portfolio Steering Committee, he led the company's efforts to expand its game portfolio with European-based development through various third party deals and the creation of a Brighton-based studio. He also headed the European team evaluating the group's global projects. In April 2008, he left NCsoft to found the consulting agency that would later become ICO Partners.

Thomas has been an active participant at many industry events for the past ten years, sharing his expertise and working on democratizing the development of online games in Europe. He has a passion for games of all kinds and is a fervent board game player, which leaves him little time to read sci-fi and fantasy or play badminton, but he does his best to keep up. He is not a werewolf.




Diane Lagrange graduated from French business school ESSEC MBA in 2005, where she specialized in Marketing, including media planning, PR and advertising. A passionate gamer, she started her career as a trainee at Ubisoft in France as Assistant Product Manager, working on marketing strategy and campaigns for the French market, before being hired by NCsoft in September 2005. She worked with Thomas on Business Development, building relationships with third party developers, sourcing, evaluating and negotiating online games projects, and heading submissions at local and global Product Review Committees. She also focused on expanding NCsoft's market research channels and studying emergent business models in online games. In late 2008, she joined Thomas in creating ICO Partners.

Apart from playing games, Diane enjoys metal and classical music, theater, and learning new things.




Jen Bolton has been gaming and socialising online since 1994, and has over a decade's professional experience of nurturing massive entertainment-oriented online communities. As Producer at Stor Entertainment, she moderated forums and live celebrity chat events for Channel 4 (UK) and championed the viral spread of Stortroopers, the company's web-based avatar generator (as well as playing quite a lot of Quake 3 on Stor's LAN). She started blogging in February of 2000, set up a dynamic community portal for UK-based bloggers two months later, and landed a seat on the judging panel for the Guardian newspaper's first Best British Blog contest in 2002.


Prior to joining ICO Partners, Jen held two separate roles within NCsoft Europe: hired in spring 2006 as Head of Community, she advanced community/social media strategy and led community teams for all NCsoft's European releases, including Guild Wars, City of Heroes and Aion. After two and a half years, she moved to become Direct Marketing Manager, with responsibility for leading the European Direct Marketing team and managing all above and below the line marketing activities for NCE.

When she's not playing or working online, Jen can often be found reading sociology books or chasing her little daughter round the garden.