Weekly News 4/22

Play Finland’s Weekly Newsletter

In this report we will combine week 4/2022from 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:

• 28-30 Jan 2022 Global Game Jam Now its the time to apply own site. In Person, Online-only, and Hybrid sites too are accepted this year, so there will be something for everyone!
• 29th January Finnish Museum of Games will party  – the 5th anniversary stream will start at 12.00!
• 3rd February Start, Build and Grow: Evolving our support for Startups in 2022 (by Google)
• 3rd – 7th Feb 2022 Special Hyper Casual Game Jam! The Game of Thrones Jam with CrazyLabs, Carry1st and Digi & Game Center
• 9th February Finnish Game Incubator Demo Day 2022 hosted by Tampere Game Hub and AhlmanEdu! Eight game pitches and much more from our third batch of Finnish Game Incubator – live on Twitch 9.2.2022 from 18:00 Finnish time onwards.
• 14-15th Feb. Pocket Gamer Connects London 2022 [LIVE!]
• 9rd March concert by Game Music Collective
• 21st – 25th Mar 2022 GDC 2022 / San Francisco
• March 28th, April 28th, May 19th, June 9th 2022, 4-6pm (CET) Towards Anti-Racist Game Development in Europe Workshop
• 27-29th April Games Job Fair
•  24th  – 28th Aug 2022 Gamescom 2022 / Cologne

See also The Game Industry Events calendar Game Conference Guide Calendar Flemish Game association calendar & Game Industry Biz

 Announcement:

• Bran new start-up, Social First (by Kim Soares and Mikko Kähärä) raised 2,5 million USD pre-seed from Play Ventures and Joakim Achrén’s syndicate

Open jobs & Recruitment:

 New releases 

• Kiemura released Emojly, Wordle with emojis. Download on App Store  Coming to Google Play soon!

 Discussion

• Neogames is asking Play Finland members intentions to attend on Pocket Gamer Connects London (onsite) and GDC San Francisco (onsite). Result by Fri 28th was:
  • 31 not going to GDC
  • 20 attending to Pocket Gamer London
  • 15 attending to San Francisco
  • 12 not going to Pocket gamer London
  • 12 maybe attending to GDC

• Jussi Elonen has a question regarding they own (and possibly many others) situation. They ase looking to make a career change to the gaming industry. It is difficult to find job openings which don’t require the usual 3 – 5-year experience within the industry. Almost all the open positions in production require a minimum of 3 years of experience.

Other News

• The Business Finland Innovation Voucher renewed. It is intended for SMEs with a new product or service idea that has potential to grow internationally, and that cannot be implemented without external expertise. The Innovation voucher provides an opportunity to buy expert services that bring new information and expertise required for innovation to your company. As a result of the reform, the grant is rised to EUR 5 000, which is 100% of the amount of the purchased services excluding VAT. The aid is transferred to the beneficiary after the beneficiary has approved and paid for the work performed by the chosen service provider.
• Solip’s Comic new episode about “Crunch mode”.
• Kickstarter continues to be a very successful platform for Tabletop Game crowdfunding campaigns even when the competing platforms, such as Gamefound, have been attracting some of the clientele.
• Finnish Game Industry Organizations (Neogames, IGDA. Suomen pelinkehittäjät ry and We in Games) started at this week the promotion campaign in co-operation with thisisFINLAND. Campaign will last whole week with daily posts and tweets until 30.1.
• The ARG That Sent It’s Players On A Real World Treasure Hunt: The Trials Riddle

• Games Now lecture at Aalto about “Indie Arena Booth Online and the Future of playable Events”
• Games Factory Talents connecting Passion & Talent  created a Discord server for gamedev job seekers, so anyone who is interested is welcome
• Story and funding of Yahaha Studios (in Finnish)