Play Finlandโs Weekly Newsletter
In this report we will combine week 49/2021 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
ย 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!
See also The Game Industry Events calendar 
Game Conference Guide Calendar Flemish Game association calendar
ย Announcements:- Returnal (by Housemarque) has won title for the Best Action Game of 2021 at The Game Awards! ๐๐ฅ
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Remedy Entertainment announced that they are working on Alan Wake 2. It’s coming in 2023 on PlayStation, Xbox, and PC on the Epic Games Store. Announcement trailer here:
Open jobs & Recruitment:
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SciPlay is looking for someone who can, in addition to working over the basics and supporting Finland studio’s games, lead and manage a team of highly-talented analysts! This is a unique opportunity and a rare position in Finland as the work includes working with SciPlay’s teams and studios around the world – a truly global position! Not many studios here can offer this type of opportunity!In addition to Oulu, Helsinki / remote / satellite team model is negotiable / considerable for us. Apply now! Don’t miss this once-in-a-lifetime-opportunity!SciPlay is also recruiting into several other positions:
- Join the future of ๐๐๐ฌ๐ฒ ๐๐๐๐๐ฌ๐ฌ ๐ ๐๐ฆ๐ ๐๐ซ๐๐๐ญ๐ข๐จ๐ง! HypeHype is looking for ๐๐ ๐๐๐ฌ๐ญ๐๐ซ๐ฌ (as well as several other positions). For the QA, you don’t have to be a senior lead type – just need passion for QA & playing games and a ‘can do’ mindset. Send your open application to jobs@frogmindgames.com. More positions here.
- If you are looking for talented games industry professionals for short- or long-term hire โ 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.comTake a look atย https://thehub.fi/jobsย for the current list of all jobs available in the Finnish Game Industry!
ย Discussion- Annakaisa Kultima asks from game developers (especially game designers): which theories/readings you have found impactful in your career helping you to grow as a professional or giving you inspiration, solutions or help as a practitioner?
- Petri Jรคrvinen: Not a game designer, but for me, the most impactful in my carreer has been people and not books. So the only thing i can recommend is to work with amazing people. Pay attention to what they do and talk with them. Even if they are not doing what you seek, in this case game design but they are for example artists, producers or programmers.. it’s amazing how much you can learn from people around you if you are just open for learning. If you want to make this more concrete, it can help to write down at least once per year what you admire about the people around you. When you admire someone, that means that they are doing something you would like to be able to do.. and that’s a path for learning. Also it’s easier to learn this way because you have a real world example next to you for how to do the task well, with concrete examples.
- Eero Manner: I’ve found Mark Cerny’s talk and “Cerny Method” very inspirational. Also, Adam Telfer’s post on how it could be applied F2P model is a great addition to it.
- Janne Matias Joensuu: This is super theoretical and it hasn’t been that useful, but it has stuck with me for more than a decade already. So I guess this is more inspirational than practical, but I still like these! There are researchers and psychologists who have studied play and games long before computers became mainstream, including Johan Huizinga and Roger Caillois. Caillois specifically separates playing into two forms (ludus and paidia, leikkiminen and pelaaminen in Finnish), categorizes types of play into Agon, Alea, Mimicry and Ilinx, etc. There’s also stuff about the Magic Circle (“when you start playing a game, you accept its rules and preconceptions”). I haven’t studied their books or read about them in detail, but the basic concepts themselves are intriguing.
- Annakaisa Kultima is asking about Covid & games? What has happened so far? What do we think about this thing?
- Dmitry Kustov: We play games to spite that pesky virus
- Jari-Pekka Kaleva : Reminded that that based on EGDF report the games industry was the only sector in creative and cultural industries that was able to continue its growth
- Jari-Pekka Kaleva : also reminded though the Finnish Game Industry has survived the pandemic better than most creative industries, COVID-19 has been challenging also for the game industry. These challenges can be divided into following categories:
โ– Problems in reaching out to partners, investors and colleagues– Delay in deals and development– Communication and remote work– Psychological fatigue and indisposition– Increase in work loadmore coherent picture of the impact of the pandemic in our 2022 report. Then we should have a more detailed picture of the impact on a number of new companies founded as well as of the bankruptcies between 2019 and 2021.
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- Vitali Kirpu: Nothing happened. People play games, they actually play more. The game industry coped with this quite well. I suppose almost no impact other than some delays due to the logistics of game dev and human contact.
- Annakaisa Kultima : Many of you have talked to me that there will be some sort of permanent hybrid-work model as a take-away from covid. Is this the case or are we already seeing another kind of thoughts on it?
- Pรคivi Porkka: I think that hybrid-work model is new future also in wider area, and even in game industry
- Annakaisa Kultima : Yes, indeed. In my pre-pandemic ethnography I had several remarks from the developers and studios from different countries that “game development definitely do not work as remote work”. I only had this one obscure Singaporean game company interviewed and they had absolutely no studio space at all… I mean of course many did not have spaces, but this one was with a longer history already. I always thought that whoa, what an anomaly. And here we are! TADAA!ย
ย So thatยดs why of course I am keeping an eye on this, as some of my dissertation chapters are happily going outdated… - Discussion continues on PlayFinland Group…
ย Funding
Other News- It’s drop day for Race Team Rivals NFT Garage, Series 1 drops today at 9 am PST / 18 CET.
- Check out the latest publication by IGDA on inclusive game design practices
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This weeks’ Solip’s Comic “Game Expats Story” — looking back to the moment when Covid-19 struct Finnish game industry.
Looking for sponsors Based on the true stories of game devs Follow at Instagram (at) solip.comic
- Listen to the latest #EvoEchange podcast hereย
Breaking into the Gaming Industry – Within Design Tuomas Roininen ย was joined by an amazing panel of guests:
Nick Sweetman – Founder Game Art Co. Paul Wilkinson – Founder at THISco Tuomas Roininen – Business Development manager Empires Not VampiresFollow to link to listen now