How 200 Finnish game developers generated $1.2 billion in 2013

i'm so honored to be here with uh all industry veterans and and my name is ruby latva and i'm working as a coordinator in neo games finland this is a non-profit organization to support finnish game industry and promote it and i'm here i'm sorry that i'm having a little flu but i'm here today to share with you a interesting information regarding finnish game industry and its current state as you know and as we have learned today the history of finnish game industry uh is 18 years old or at least you know that it wasn't born yesterday but it's not that long uh history actually that this kind of our search history gives our industry and especially the small sizes of our companies gives our industry ability to be a child

and also react the changes of the markets as as we have witnessed during past years and rules of our game development as you heard earlier lies in strong hobbyist culture and still for most of the developers is an industry of passion i don't think that there is too many people in finnish game industry working without being really passionate about what they are doing and we have been kind of we have got some fame in in globally last couple during last couple of years because of the success of supercell and rovio but as as you know that there there has been lots of success stories all already in early days like a hub podel and and other companies was not mentioned in in the history not that i i realized and digital chocolate and also also in console and pc side like remedies max

payne and everything and of course you all know this recent success stories and lots of new promising companies are born in all the time if we talk about numbers and if we look how our industry has been progressing and how our industry turnover has been progressing during last couple of years you can see that it's growing actually the turnover actually the growth between 2012 and 2013 was amazing 250 percent it's not really bad and with the turnover of last year 900 million euros the magic limit of 1 billion euros is getting closer and with this game industry core numbers we mean uh game game development and turnover of the game development but excluding merchandises and acquisitions and if we include merchandises

acquisitions and investments the total turnover of the finnish game industry last year was 2.2 billion euro euros and just to mention that we have 5.5 million citizens so i would say that it's impressive we have been lately pretty lucky with the financial transactions or finnish game industry has been lucky with the financial transactions and by the way you can find all these numbers from the leaflet which is uh you can get it from our board now games both from outside this game industry of finland you can learn to learn the details if you cannot memorize everything now so you can learn the details later but during 2011 and 2014 uh almost 1.8 billion us dollars has been collected to the finnish game industry in a form of private investments and emergencies and acquisitions

and with that money that money offers a great opportunities for several new startups and existing companies to create even more great success stories and if you look if we look about the number of employees it's only 2500 or 400 which we estimated that we have in finnish game industry at the moment and if we would compare this number of employees to our our total value of the industry of last year which was 2.2 billion euros if we compare it to the amount of employees at the moment i must say that the finnish game industry is efficient um there are 200 game industry startups in gaming gaming companies in finland and you can all fi you can find them all from our web pages neogames.fi

and significant part of the companies are developing games for mobile platforms but there are also development in other platforms all the other platforms existing platforms sorry and there are lots of new startups i would say that uh over 50 percent of new existing gain companies has been established by during last couple of years there are lots of so-called second-round startups so people who have been employed in rovio or supercell or other established companies they have started their new business so the young age of the company doesn't mean that they wouldn't have experience and the sizes of the finnish game industry is surprisingly small in general there are only four companies who had more than 100 employees and obvious biggest with its 800 employees but lots of the studios are really small

and most of our game studios and especially established game studios are located in capital area but there is lots of uh promising game industry hotspots in other areas too we have been always often asked that how come finnish game industry has become so successful and the answer is really simple we just have something in our water and and that's the kind of the easy way to answer it well as uh in the panelists we we have learned that we have some other things also and i would say that at one of the most important thing is that we have really tight community uh and it's supporting and sharing and caring and it's also strongly nurtured by itda finland which has been existing already for years and we have these itda gatherings in helsinki every month regularly and i think that uh during the last couple of years we have had something like 400 uh

participants or 300 to 400 participants in every gatherings and they are in informal colorings you can just share your ideas and and have a beer and of course we have nokia and it has uh giving it has been given a lot for our industry and for our developers but i would also say that when uh nokia was not doing that much game development inside inside the company it also gave us an opportunity or our industry as an opportunity to be independent and uh agile when they were the studio sites were small when developing uh mobile games at the early days and of course we have texas national game national funding for innovation and technology and and for games too and neo games has been existing for from 2003 and we have been supporting finnish game industry

best as we can so that was my my kind of two cents and if you want to know more please visit our webpage now games.fi or don't hesitate to contact me