Jyväskylä Expa, now also an IGDA Finland Hub!

Expa's December Gathering had both a great guest and lots of cause for celebration. Formally, Expa is registered in 2013, but actually, it was already alive and well in 2012. This means that Expa is now one year old!

Congratulations Expa!

But there is more: Expa is now officially an IGDA Finland hub, representing game developers from Jyväskylä around Finland and the world.

As a guest, we had Joachim Achrén, formerly the lead analyst at Supercell and now running his own company, Next Games. Joachim gave us great tips on what kinds of numbers to crunch in games.

We also heard about the game projects that are part of Expa Game Lab. Four games in total are on their way to completion in 2014, and we heard what Buggers, Seth, COMA and CyberAfrica had been doing.

In January, Expa kicked the year off with Unity and Microsoft, when the LevelUp-tour came to Jyväskylä. First, developers spent the day doing games for Windows 8 and Windows Phone. It was a great chance to hear tips and tricks for Unity, and then have a chance at publishing a game on the Windows platforms.

Later in the evening, we played Tekken Tag Tournament 2. There was a tournament of 12 players, with Sami Sorvo taking the lead with an unbroken chain of wins. Congratulations!

IGDA Finland January Gathering with Applifier

This week Tuesday meant Club Adams would be full of game developers from dawn till dusk – and beyond! – as LevelUp, the game development tour organized together with Microsoft and Unity, started its second day early in the morning and continued till late in the afternoon. No doubt many great games were worked on and we will be looking forward to seeing the fruits of everyone's labors!

After a hard day of work it was time for everyone to grab their well-earned drink tickets and put them to good use. Before the attendees were too engaged in their chatter however, the gathering sponsor Applifier shared the highlights of their service Everyplay which monetizes with video ads, brings you high quality users and provides game replays for users to share.

Whether it was the belated winter or possibly prolonged holidays that kept a lot of people at home, it was still another successful gathering with a grand total of 177 attendees. Thanks for everyone who showed up and those who made it possible – until next time!

IGDA Finland January Gathering with Applifier

Year 2014 has barely started while we are already looking forward to kick it off with some real treats! Next week our friends at Applifier will be sponsoring this year’s first official gathering which is guaranteed to lighten up your mood in the middle of this winter without winter. Applifier is the company behind Everyplay Replays and Everyplay Game Ads. Everyplay Replays is live in over 230 mobile games, including Bad Piggies, Tiny Troopers 2 and the latest success story in the field of mobile gaming, Beat the Boss 3. At the moment they are working hard on the Android release of Everyplay Replays, so to get a first feel of the Everyplay Android, join us for the first IGDA Finland meeting of 2014!

Additionally, we are organizing a weeklong game development tour LevelUp together with Microsoft and Unity! From the 13th to the 17th of January the tour will be at five different cities, bringing you the opportunity to take your Unity games to Windows platforms with help of the best trainers. Prepare for good time, exciting competitions, great prizes, delicious food and drinks –and of course parties! LevelUp is free and the evening parties are open for everyone. Space for the event itself is limited however, so make sure to reserve your spot in time! Read more of the event on here.

LevelUp arrives in Helsinki and takes over Club Adams on Tuesday, January 14th and after an intensive day of making games it’s time to relax in the official IGDA Finland January Gathering, the generous folks of Applifier making sure your mouth won’t be left dry.

IGDA Finland January Gathering Time: 14.01.2014 at 19:00 Place: Club Adams, Erottaja 15-17, Helsinki Finland

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December IGDA Finland Turku Hub Gathering

A year of gatherings came to an end in Turku with a special guest from the finnish mobile game history. Taneli Armanto, the creator of the famous Snake -mobile game on Nokia devices was sharing some stories behind the Snake -game and boy was it interesting. The game is probably one of the most largely distributed mobile game ever and while it was in development, it wasn't clear it would turn into a huge success. Vitali Kirpu, an indie developer from Turku is making a name for himself with his Pixel Piracy getting greenlighted in Steam in just a few days. In the game, the player controls the crew of a pirate ship. The player must sail the ship over a number of sea zones, each with procedurally generated events in a roguelike fashion, while facing pirates and other hostile forces, recruiting new crew members, keeping discipline, outfitting, upgrading ship and more.

The game was quickly featured in Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Polygon and Wired UK. Check out a gameplay video, it's great!

-IGDA Finland Turku Hub folks

Industry Partner Interview with G-Cluster

IGDA Finland has grown its ranks with new industry partners like Lexia and Amazon Web Services. One of the newcomers is also G-Cluster. We wanted to find out a little bit more about this cloud gaming platform provider and ask how they want to be a part of the Finnish game industry growth.

Here is our interview with President & Representative Director of G-Cluster, Erik Piehl.

What are the three most important facts that people should know about G-Cluster? 1. Cloud gaming enables users of virtually any connected screen to experience great games. G-cluster is the leading cloud gaming platform provider. 2. Our platform enables telecom and other service operators to provide a cloud gaming channel to their end users. 3. G-cluster is a turnkey provider of cloud gaming: we have technology, licensed content and operations.

What differentiates your product from competitors’? G-cluster is already deployed globally: in Europe with Orange and SFR, in Japan with NTT Plala and Broadmedia and in the U.S. with a not yet disclosed tier-1 partner.

What are your different target groups and how are they different from each other? Our primary target groups are children, the female audience and people who used to be gamers. Our content catalogue has various games targeting these groups, supported typically by different price points.

About 78 % of the 1.2 billion gamers around the world play mobile games (Applift & Newzoo market research: http://www.applift.com/the-global-mobile-games-market.html). How do you think the mobile games market is different from other games markets? The mobile game market is unique in many ways: through app stores it has democratized the publishing ability of developers and thus challenged the role of traditional publishers. Mobile games market has introduced new low price points (even free) that we did not see in the past. For content developers it present new challenges and opportunities in that the audience is much wider and respectively the expected attention span of a game a lot shorter than in other gaming markets.

The cloud gaming market is expected to reach 8 billion by the year 2017. How does G-Cluster feel about this growth? We are already part of the growth of the cloud gaming market. 8 billion by 2017 is a huge and great goal. We see the market changing and picking up interest currently in an unprecedented way.

What made you decide to become an IGDA Finland Industry Partner? We have deals in place with about 40 game publishers worldwide. Since a lot of our DNA is coming from Finland, we want to have closer relationships with Finnish game companies and G-cluster better known in its birth country.

What is going to be the role of G-Cluster in developing and growing the Finnish games industry? We want to contribute to the boom of Finnish game industry by providing a new global distribution channel for games created in Finland. G-cluster desires to have games specifically created for our platform exploiting its unique features such as the support for multiple screens, and thus we believe there are new exciting opportunities for creative game design with us.

For more information check out G-Cluster’s website www.g-cluster.com

Editor: Tuuli Peltonen