Play Finland’s Weekly Newsletter
In this report we will combine week 22/2023 from the Finnish Game Industry and will be posted every Friday afternoon. Check out the previous post here.
News are gathered from the Play Finland group posts during the week. That is why we recommend you to post by yourself (however not flood) your Finnish Game Industry related news to the group. It also guarantees that your news will be visible in the weekly newsletter /news compilation. Play Finland is at the moment one of the main channels for sharing information inside the industry.
Best Regards,
Neogames Finland
Events:
- 8th June Games First Helsinki. Click this link
- 23-27th August Gamescom / Cologne
- 12-13th PG Connects Helsinki
- 12th-13th October W Love Games free tickets available.
- Call for speakers and workshop facilitators for this year’s WLG Conference is still open for a bit over a month, make sure you send your proposals by June 25th
- Showroom are now open, the booths are free of charge as everything else WLG offers.
Sign up here
- 2-3rd November Game Connection Europe
- 3oth Nov.-1st Dec. SLUSH
See also The Game Industry Events calendar 
Game Conference Guide Calendar Flemish Game association calendar & Game Industry Biz
Open jobs & Recruitment:
- If you are looking for talented games industry professionals for short- or long-term hire – please check out the anonymous GameDevTalents board with screened and pre-interviewed talents ranging from mid to senior levels of experience and open to career opportunities. Feel free to reach out for details! And if you are Talent working in games industry or willing to join the Finnish games industry, feel free to apply https://gamedevtalents.com. Additionally, here is an anonymous list of talents who joined our Games Job Fair event and are open to career opportunities. If you want to see someone’s full profile, please feel free to reach out with the Contact button, so that they reach out to the talent for their consent. In your email please specify the project and/or position you are hiring for. A job description would be ideal.
- Take a look at https://thehub.fi/jobs for the current list of all jobs available in the Finnish Game Industry!
- Uratarinoita, erilaisista ihmisistä / mostly in Finnish, but few different career stories in English too
Discussion- Suvi Latva asks for Neogames; “What would be the best ways to learn (in some level systematically) game programming, if you are not part of the any formal education institute?”
- Miku Pesola asks how people see a future for narrative focused / story driven mobile games in the west?
- Annakaisa Kultima is trying to find all hiding Aalto Games Alumni. If you have been studying game design at Aalto University or any subject at Aalto University (or Helsinki University of Technology, the Helsinki School of Economics and the University of Art and Design Helsinki before the merger) and now work in games, let AK know. AK is inviting people to our intimate day of celebrating our game network of alumni!
- Matti Ollila got the job at game industry and is now looking for an apartment in Helsinki
New releases 
- MiTale’s mobile game “My Best Friends – Virtual Pet” is now launched globally for Android and iOS
- DOOMBLADE by Muro Studios has been released at Steam
-
eShop
💰 Funding:
- DigiDemo funding has opened and the grant is up for grabs during 15th of May through 11th of Sep. See instructions here.
Other News
- Skábma by Red Stage Entertainment celebrates Sami culture (Article in Finnish)
- The Skins workshops team is coming to Sápmi (Utsjoki, Finland) this week! The Skins Workshops (since 2006) teach Indigenous youth how to adapt stories from their community into experimental digital media, such as video games.
- Vote for the best talk of the year for the Games Now lecture series!
- Games Factory Talents connecting Passion & Talent event brought together 19 studios from across Europe, offering over 160 open positions to 2150 talented professionals from across 96 countries, out of which over 130 talents joined us onsite for the last day of the event.
- We in Games Finland, together with IGDA Finland, carried out a survey in 2021 on experiences of the game industry in Finland. The results portray a mostly welcoming, safe and surprisingly harassment-free atmosphere in the game industry ecosystem events in Finland. More attention would be needed to ensure that also juniors, and marginalised genders and groups would experience belonging to the community. Also alcohol-free industry events were hoped and welcomed. The results portray a mostly welcoming, safe and surprisingly harassment-free atmosphere in the game industry ecosystem events in Finland. More attention would be needed to ensure that also juniors, and marginalised genders and groups would experience belonging to the community. Also alcohol-free industry events were hoped and welcomed.