Finland for game developers: a small country with great opportunities
Finns know how to make not only cool music, but also great games. A country with a population of some 5 million people and only 240 game studios boasts a gaming market turnover of € 2.2 billion. Do you know names like Supercell, Rovio, Remedy Entertainment, Housemarque, Seriously Entertainment? They are all Finnish studios.
Moreover, Finland has become a center of attraction for the world’s leading game development companies: offices of Ubisoft, Electronic Arts, Epic Games, Huuuge Games, Zynga and others have opened in Helsinki.
This is a good place for a soft launch: Finns are paying (and accustomed to paying!) Users with a Western mentality and pleasant ARPU at $ 48…
Did you know that in Finland the government sponsors start-ups and game studios, and foreign developers are welcomed with open arms? We are in Alconost decided to learn more about these tempting prospects and talked to an expert in Finnish game development.
Meet Oleg Paliy, CEO of a Finnish company Games factory talents and organizer of Finnish Game Day. Games Factory Talents is Finland’s only recruiting company exclusively in the gaming industry. They work with all the major gaming companies.
Very soon Oleg and his team will hold a cool event for developers and all those interested in Finnish game development – Finnish Games Career Day.
Oleg, tell us about the Finnish Games Career Day online event on October 28th. Who do you advise to take part?
Finnish Games Career Day was born out of Games Job Fair – this is our recruiting event, where Finnish game studios come and where they select talented developers for their team. We have already come from Games Job Fair to St. Petersburg, Kiev, Tallinn and Helsinki.
This year, for obvious reasons, all offline events had to be canceled, so we decided to hold an online event Finnish Games Career Day, and today we already have 15 fairly large studios that are interested in developers from abroad, including from Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. The event is held in English (this is the only requirement for candidates) and it is free.
The goal of Finnish Games Career Day is to introduce foreign developers to Finnish game companies, so that developers can find interesting projects for themselves and ultimately get a job, and Finnish studios get new talent to the team.
Is it true that Finnish gaming companies are very interested in Russian developers?
In general, they are generally interested in attracting talent from other countries, since only 3,500 people work in Finland in the gaming industry, and more than 300 vacancies are open. That is, there is a strong shortage of developers.
Although a few years ago, our universities opened programs for game developers and designers, they do not keep pace with the growth of the industry, they do not have time to supply new specialists. This boom started after the explosive success of Rovio, then Supercell – and it pushed other people to make games. Finland also has a close-knit gaming community, and you can always find a mentor and people to help you.
Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian developers are appreciated, it’s true. Plus, we have established contacts thanks to the annual events that we hold – Games Job Fairs in St. Petersburg and Kiev are already traditional.
Interestingly, Finnish Games Career Day will only be held on October 28, but several developers have already received and accepted offers from Finnish companies – even before the event.
What format will Finnish Games Career Day take?
In the morning, Finnish game studios will speak and talk about their products and job openings, and developers will be able to chat with companies at their virtual booths and ask questions. It will also be possible to pass interviews, see other vacancies on our virtual board.
The second part of the event is dedicated to Finland: our partners will speak there, who will talk about all aspects of relocation, about the friendly game development community in Finland and how companies help their foreign colleagues successfully move and find a new home in Finland.
Your team has another interesting project – Finnish Game Day. How is it different from Finnish Games Career Day?
Finnish Game Day is a separate project about business. This event has already become traditional: for 4 years in a row we have been holding it in partnership with White Nights a day before WN in St. Petersburg, we bring about 20-25 studios to acquaint Finnish game studios with Russian and the whole CIS, as well as talk about investments.
It was thanks to Finnish Game Day that we helped small Finnish game studios to conclude successful contracts for publishing their games and even get investments. Plus, this event tells about the Finnish gaming industry from a business perspective, and this prompted some Russian developers to open their game studios in Finland.
Our company Games Factory Talents, in turn, helps in such cases: we introduce you to key players, help open a company, and sort out tax and legal issues.
You are actively involved in events involving Finnish game development companies. Are there many of them in Finland at all?
Now in Finland there are about 240 game studios, of which about 20 are large: Supercell, Rovio, Remedy Entertainment, Housemarque, as well as such foreign companies as Ubisoft, EA, Zynga, Epic Games, etc.
Why do foreign gaming companies open offices in Finland, what attracts them?
They come for expertise. Finland already has a well-functioning ecosystem for game developers, as the first Finnish commercially successful game appeared 25 years ago. It is also convenient to do business in Finland: all bookkeeping is online, there is little bureaucracy, everything is organized simply and transparently. And the cherry on the cake is support from the state for the development of the project.
Seriously, can you get financial support for the development of the game in Finland?
Any Finnish company can get help from the state, so yes, as a Finnish studio, you can get various grants and support in terms of product development, technology development for the game. Well, not quite any – the project must be recognized as innovative. This support is especially relevant for startups, because development takes a lot of time and resources.
Such companies as Supercell, Rovio – they all received such support from the state at one time. Then this money returned to the state in the form of taxes 🙂 Our modest Games Factory Talents also applied and received a grant, so as you can see, any Finnish company has a chance.
By the way, Business Finland, an organization that evaluates such projects and understands the gaming industry, will speak at our online event on October 28, but at the event they will talk not about grants, but about the support they offer specifically to foreign talents who decide to come. work in Finland.
You mentioned Finland’s tight-knit game development community. Tell us what is special about it?
As I already said, only 3,500 people are employed in the game industry in Finland, so everyone knows each other and regularly see each other at events. For example, in Helsinki, such events are held every month – game studios perform there, people communicate and exchange experiences. Finnish Game Jam is often held.
In Helsinki we have Arcade 5, an entire indie studio complex that also hosts events. Bigger companies come there to get acquainted with talented guys: if in the future the projects of indie studios do not take off, then the larger companies will gladly take these indie developers into their team.
All cities in Finland have an IGDA Finland cell. Therefore, communication in a gamedev party takes place in English, and being a foreign developer in Finland is quite comfortable. At Finnish Games Career Day, you will be able to learn more about IGDA Finland.
It’s very cool that here every professional in the gaming industry (or anyone who aspires to become one) can find a mentor for himself. IGDA has a Mentor Cafe, and their goal is not to help companies, but specifically to individual talent.
It seems to me that there is no such regular and constant exchange of experience in other countries, this is a unique feature of Finland – an established ecosystem that supports developers.
Is Finland really a good market for mobile soft launch?
Yes, Finns have long been accustomed to mobile games and the fact that you have to pay for them. Nokia became the locomotive of this entire industry when they launched the N-gage project – a phone for games. Nokia needed content, and they funded development for several studios, including Rovio. Then, when the App Store and Google Play appeared, it was easy for game studios to retrain, since they already had experience in creating mobile games, there were established teams.
Thus, since the days of Nokia, Finns have become accustomed to paying for digital content. Well, we use mobile phones for everything: last year, even payment for transport was completely transferred to the phone. Therefore, playing mobile games and paying with us is taken for granted.
As a localization studio, we are wondering if you would advise us to translate games into Finnish?
Many Finns understand English well, because television in Finland is not dubbed (i.e. foreign films and programs in English) – the country is small, only 5 million people. Therefore, when the Finns themselves develop games and applications, they make them not in Finnish, but in English.
And then, of course, they are localized into other languages - the domestic market is small, and in any case we have to go beyond it.
Some Finnish studios primarily localize games into Russian. Like when an indie studio Polka Dot Studio launched the game Trendy Stylist, they localized it into Russian and even partnered with Russian influencer Sasha Spielberg.
Alconost comment: we often translate mobile games into Finnish, Swedish, and even Icelandic. Although, of course, these languages are more often chosen by mobile application developers. We have already told the success stories of applications RetouchMe (35 languages) and Wachanga (50+ languages) – localization into several dozen languages helped them to reach the top in markets with less popular and, accordingly, less competitive languages.
Interested in becoming part of the Finnish development team? Register on Finnish Games Career Day – we remind you that the event is free, but is held in English.
And if you want localize a game or application in Finnish or any other of 70+ languages, visit us at Alconost.
Anyone who has already localized the app will surely like Nitro – a convenient service for quickly translating updates and other short texts into the same languages that we offer at Alconost.
about the author
The article was written in Alconost.
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