March '09 Presentation: Dive into indie business

Once again people behind the Finnish game industry gathered to listen to IGDA Finland's Presentations, this time taking place at Diana-auditorio, Helsinki. Followed by the monthly Gathering event at Cuba Cafe, the presentation was held on March 10th and it was organized in association with Remedy Entertainment. The inspiring line-up consisted of Paavo Perttula from Tweehouse, Petri Purho from Kloonigames and Jani Kahrama from Secret Exit.  There were 13 were new visitors in a total of 97 participants, more than filling up every seat! Paavo Perttula presented their business plans for a social-interaction-oriented MMO game targeted for young audiences. Having offices in Helsinki and Santa Monica in California, Tweehouse secures their revenue sources by offering design and implementation services and live services alongside their own game development. They are developing their own multiplayer platform called Trunktech specifically designed for developing, deploying and managing massively multiplayer applications. Paavo also showed us their intuitive map editor which can be used to easily create large, interactive game worlds and to publish them in realtime as well.

Next up was Petri Purho from Kloonigames and the Post Mortem of Crayon Physics Deluxe. Petri begun his presentation with a relaxed and humoristic touch and told about his life before original Crayon Physics. In 2006 he got into prototyping game development which meant creating one new game every week. Petri told us this worked well for him and he started publishing a new game each month on his blog at kloonigames.com. In June 2007 he created Crayon Physics in five days which sparked so much attention and interest that Petri decided to make a better version of it. Crayon Physics Deluxe prototype video gained fame on Youtube and spawned a number of clones, both commercial and non-commercial ones. Crayon Physics Deluxe won the Seamus McNally Grand Prize in 2008.

The third presentation was given by Jani Kahrama from Secret Exit on indie game development and their experiences with it. Secret Exit started off with two people but hired two more when they received funding. They told us that the amoung of competition in indie development is huge and the marketing opportunities are lacking. Good timing is essential and to push the sales the developers should aim to remove all obstacles at the same time as opposed to one after another. Jani explained that their game Zen Bound got lots of positive feedback but the public visibility was low. They did make the front page feature and that multiplied their sales by four. The lesson in the presentation was to advertise on all available channels at the same time and to wait for sales increase and then ride on the sales with, for example, lowering the price just as the peak is beginning to fall off. Zen Bound won the IMGA award “Excellence in 3D”.

Q&A session followed the presentations. After the presentations people headed off across the street to have a party at the IGDA Finland Gathering in Cuba Cafe!