Games Executive, Director, General Manager & Product Leader | Product, Design, Commercialization, Go-to-Market, Production & Leadership
Finnish #gameindustry is at its worst economical point, and we need to have a reality check on the causes that has driven us here - this is important if we would want to achieve the vision Ilkka Paananen called out along with Suomen startup-yhteisö. 1. Lack of commercial sentiment & #leadership - after 2016-2018, the industry were left behind vs. how foreign businesses evolved: - Studios have been too creative-driven & relaxed. - IP & brand syndromes, e.g., many haven't created new hits since their 1st nor been able to create new IPs / brands. - Missed completely #hypercasual wave & its learnings; and, because of this, came late to #hybridcasual. - Many don't know how to publish & distribute games. Many early stage studios leaned on publishers, whilst after #IDFA there's a clear gap between how foreign studios distribute games vs. our studios approach it. - Finland had #F2P is 'bad' sentiment within devs., showcasing immaturity, which was a thing during the golden era of F2P. - Not evolving when it was necessary or following shifts on best practices on e.g., #monetization on scale (if you look at e.g., Scopely, they really were heavy-lifting to became great on where they are today, whilst our biggest f2p player had to catch up years after on this). - #AAA, #PC & #Console releases with misses lately; with additional layers of having budgets getting out of control, QA done poorly, etc. 2. Not knowing how to own companies + issues with buyers after exits: - We have had #founders who knew how to build companies, whilst they exited early. Unfortunately, on many cases, the buyers have shut down the studios they bought. - Additionally, buyers & foreign studios who are still operating tend to let studios optimize comfort over #commercialization (correlating with 1). - #Games #millionaires not starting new companies. 3. Funding landscape: - #VCs shifting to invest abroad, resulting to gates for cash inflow to #Finland. - Games millionaires not participating on circulating cash back to the industry (e.g. security wins over games). If they have stakes on #funds, the problem stays same as long as above is valid. - Evergreen Finnish funds have shifted away from games. This includes successful funds who made it, but don't believe they will see new Supercell; thus they have shifted away as well. - Government #financing entities investing in wrong trends and shifts, on top of moving slowly around them. 4. #Politics, #education and #economical issues: - Highest taxation in the world, resulting also game millionaires moving out (correlates with 3). - Some education programs have been shut down. Some don't teach commercial side the right way. Some produce talent to wrong positions, resulting unemployment. - Work-based immigration regulation. - Etc. While I love working here, I'm calling out a reality check that everyone needs to do to uplift our industry. I'm doing my best to improve the industry & sentiment here, but we need everyone on this cause.
Ivan Anisimov
3mo
Hi Antti, looks like it's been quite tough times, but I'd like to add one more point. I find it difficult to introduce any new technical solutions to Finnish founders and companies. I have been to PG connect Helsinki and while some people from other countries like UK,Germany and the like were willing to communicate and understand what new solutions are present on market for gamedev and how it can be used, some were even concluding deals straight on the meeting, it was total disinterest from home audience. And I would accept it without doubt that it would be something breaking the ground, not having any business cases, but it was already something considered more or less common for the industry. In the fast paced industry that gamedev is being technically and business savvy can be crucial for both revenue and operation management, but it looks that without leadership programmes and kind of technical council ready to test new approaches and then sharing best practices you can be constantly running behind instead of keeping up the pace.
Jari Pauna
4mo
Agree with your points here, except I don't miss the exploitative hypercasuals biz modus operandi. One needs to ride a rising tide and here the tide is certainly not rising now, if ever.
Joakim Achren
4mo
Excellent points, Antti Kananen! Thanks for focusing on commercialisation problems 🙏 I feel like the "we only make games that we want to play" has pros and cons, and the cons are often not understood, educated and grasped, by aspiring founders. Just to share an example: when a founder from another country is making games, they might build the monetization first, the build the game on top of that. This approach is very alien to a Finnish founder.
very interesting analysis! I am not very convinced about #4 but I think there is also an extra point about the limit talent available due to a focus on on-site. Not everybody can and/or wants to move to Helsinki! 😅
Michael French
3mo
Thanks for sharing this. Some of this is surprising to me given Finland has been held in such high regard by folks in other territories. But I actually see some correlations with some unspoken & hard truths in London/UK. We have a different ecosystem which offsets some of the shared problems, but there's some overriding common themes I think.
Timo Ylikangas
3mo
I disagree a lot of with few of the points at paragraph 1. but agree mainly with 2. and 3., however the 4. has more room for discussion. Too much to write, sorry for that. Happy to discuss more when we meet.
Looking back on my 30+ years history on gaming, I get a strong deja vu feeling. Technically all gaming development & markets have been in this same situation at time-or-another due to market shifts. And most times the reasons and proposed actions in the history have been same what Antti mentioned in his post. Maybe we should ask five times why this keeps repeating itself.
I tend to agree, though I also struggle to think of a country that's done significantly better these past few years. Turkey had an amazing run, but then struggled with the "slowdown" of hypercasual. French studios I think did extremely well, though again I'm hard pressed to name a standout studio / launch in the recent past (there might be and I'm missing them).. Not to mention LatAm, that continues to grow its user base and studio count but hasn't been able to quite live up to its potential (yet). It's been a rough few years for the industry. I ended up leaving a cushy C-level position at etermax to launch X3M because I felt that there were obvious, gaping pains in ads monetization. So far, so good, but I'm still surprised at the amount of studios that underestimate the importance of truly understading this core revenue vertical and how existing providers differ in their offering and incentives (not Huuuge, we ❤️ Huuuge). So my view is "yes" to the problem, but "no" to Finland is faring much worse than the rest. Some issues that you mention might be specific to Finland, but overall I think the entire studio ecosystem struggled to overcome these past few years. Txs for posting!
Julien Velicitat
3mo
Many of those points are not specific to Finland and could be applied to a chunk of the Western games industry no? The reckoning it's been going through over the past few years, although shocking to some was predictable and necessary. This is an opportunity to take a step back and reset, making games is more accessible than it ever was but making it as a business goes beyond this and the competition is fiercer than ever. Now the question is will we learn and adapt or will we keep repeating the same mistakes? To do so we might need to take a good look at all the omnipotent decision makers accountable for many of the issues you've highlighted.
A bold attempt to analyze the status of the whole industry ecosystem. I feel that I can only comment on the AAA part. Not sure what are the misses relating to this section, but the fact is that the output of AAA games in Finland is very low. I count only 3 games released during the past five--six years, so it's a game every two years! I am also not aware what you mean that the budgets are getting out of control either as I am not sure how do we know if that has happened. I guess you can say if the budget was too big knowing if the game was financially successful or not. As everyone knows, the competition in the PC & Console space is fierce and games published first time years ago dominate the playtime of consumers. Only a handful of 14,000 new Steam games grosses over $5 million and not many new games reach each year to top 100 grossing games. LoL, GTA V, Minecraft, Fortnight and Roblox dominate a huge portion of playtime followed by annual franchises like CoD and sports games. This leave a minuscule portion of consumer attention to new games releases in a particular year. These new games included Diablo 4 and Baldur's Game 3 last year. Releasing a new IP in this environment is, well, pretty hard to put it mildly.