Nordic Game 2015 Diary: Day 1

okay guys we are here at nordic game 2015. we've just completed the first day everyone's looking surprisingly upbeat considering that's what caffeine does to you good three cheers for caffeine hooray so the important question that everyone needs the answer to how is the catering oh my gosh meatballs it's not a stereotype me but i think just i've had i had meatballs for breakfast and then meatballs for lunch but we would have had if we'd had any because we didn't get it we missed it i managed to get some meatballs for lunch the only thing i would say was surprising is that at no point did i see a chef with a top hat that's slightly over his eyes and an overly large mustache that's all i'm gonna say we thought it was just an ikea thing it turns out turns out the markets were pretty correct too when it came to it obviously life lessons from the muppets exactly well we've been roving around you and i specifically with a camera trying to get little bits and pieces but i haven't seen that many talks you guys have both been in talks what are your highlights from the day what what excited you

ladies first ah okay well this is quite easy actually there was an amazing talk by a guy called um simon stalinhag and it's it's quite funny because to be actually the talk itself went pretty badly um the whole the whole talk was about art and his amazing um art that he's been designing and um just none of the pictures worked so it was a black screen behind him powerpoint 45 minutes so it was just like no describing interpretive dance to your art but he did really well surprisingly and actually for the last 10 minutes it worked and he's a really inspirational guy he was working as a game developer and he just he hated it he was like i might i'm just spending my life in photoshop i can't be creative i've got all these ideas so he just said right i'm going to quit my job and i'm going to create this fictional world and set all the movies that i loved growing up so 1980s dystopia um and he just created this incredible

space all digital artwork he now designs for films and video games and has set out this incredible book that you can buy online and call tales from the loop and it's just yeah it was just it was just a really inspiring tale of a game developer really chasing their dream as cheesy as that sounds and overcoming powerpoint slide adversity she did all that but he couldn't get powerpoint to work four out of ten george have you seen anything so i was seeing something as well which was about kind of about chasing dreams so phil elliot from square enix collective um if you haven't heard about square enix collective it's basically the site where indie developers can go and pitch their games the square enix community votes on them and the ones that get the most votes square units looking sporting basically while they're doing their kickstarter campaign they'll give them like a seal of approval give them a load of a big push out to make sure that they're basically getting as much exposure as possible and then trying to help them reach their funding target so they can achieve their dream so you mentioned it earlier sounds almost a little bit green lighty but yeah

it was really interesting so the indie developer goes into the back end and puts in the screenshots they put in the description of the game they put in the links then square enix puts out on site and whatever gains the interest then square enix goes back to them and goes hey you've got really interesting idea let's see what we can do with this and it helps them to try and achieve those goals and what phil was talking about in particular he was really showing us how the projects that they've put up for kickstarter so far how well they've done and what they've learned from it so what was really interesting was the first project that square enix actually put out for kickstarter with a kind of a seal of approval bombed it totally tanked it was called world war machine and it did look really interesting but what he was saying was that they didn't work hard enough with the developer to coordinate everything and so the developer launched the kickstarter without square enix really knowing that they had done it they didn't get the marketing push at the right time and they missed that all important launch period and it missed out on its targeting goal by about 38 000 pounds which is a huge huge failure

but then the next project um which was i believe a kind of babylon six style turn-based shooter which was it was i didn't really get the full gist of it but it looked kind of awesome that one exceeded its target by about five or six times over and after that success they went and built upon it and came up some really handy tips for developers who might be considering a kickstarter to go about making the most of it all right fair enough we've seen a lot of games just walking around the place it's quite multi-platform this place how much love have we seen for mobile here so far today it's been it's been mixed there have been the occasional people who've been like oh i've got a mobile game and it will be virtual reality mobile game i mean i i think very much this conference has been focused i've seen a lot of pc games a lot of console games and a few people chatting about using angry birds as a benchmark for how great the nordic game industry is and the pinnacle that the nordic region has achieved um but specific people coming up with a smartphone and going look look at my

game yeah um yeah i've not really seen how about you i think the really interesting trend at this conference is the fact that pc mobile vr it's all kind of coming together and that's the reason why you're maybe not seeing like a dedicated mobile game or a dedicated pc game even a dedicated vr game because people will do a vr game and they'll say this is coming out oculus but one i'll make sure that it's ready for the gear vr which is obviously samsung's version and at the same time i've spoken to loads of pc developers who have said well we're making this game and because of microsoft's development like windows 10 where tablets are basically able to run you know steam games it's essentially that these games are kind of becoming mobile by default really the boundaries are blurring a little bit aren't they everyone's kind of going a bit multi-platform exactly i mean i'll be honest pocketgamer went with steam about a week ago started covering it and when i first saw it i was a bit like really and then talking at the show today it's like well that's totally right i mean it really seemed to be blurring together and particularly for those indie developers making a success of a paid

mobile game if you're not five nights at freddy's is really difficult so naturally you want to be able to expand out so i think pc and mobile they're quite nicely complementing steam on the one hand is this great paid market that exists even though it itself is getting overpopulated and then you've got the indie mobile opportunity as a way of kind of topping it up so i mean yeah definitely not many people who are solely mobile focused but a lot of people who still are thinking about mobile as part of their overall game plan yeah that's even true with um that one of the opening keynotes was from ubisoft and it was titled cross-platform collaboration as a key to success i think that was the second keynote of the entire conference which shows how much we're seeing that trend kind of coming to the forum and with the nintendo stuff as well i'm going for the nx system we're not sure exactly what the system is but the idea that it's going to unite all of their platforms from the home console stuff to the dss to tablet software when they start making which they're going to be doing soon the idea that everything's going to be a unified experience across multiple

platforms just what to pick at the moment it sounds fascinating i have no idea how well it's actually going to work in practice because you know microsoft have said this is what windows 10 is going to be like but what it's going to be like and what it actually is is a completely different question but if it does work i mean i love the idea of potentially being able to pick up great steam games play on a tablet on the go and maybe not be so restricted by just what the app store offers because although i completely appreciate the appeal of free to play casual games i myself are more of a hardcore indie gamer who likes to play for his games i get those kind of look at you and think hardcore exactly that's it hardcore just look at the jacket look at it honestly you've got like the color up exactly i feel like i should be more like exactly into the full decade that's it exactly i feel like i should be part of a really nerdy biker gang that's don't be a part of a bike you know and i've seen the news badly so we tend to approach these conferences from a coverage perspective we all either at organizing events or doing journalism or whatever

if you are coming here to either network or you're trying to sell your ad network or you're trying to push your latest development project what do you think's the best way to go about doing it how do you get visibility at a place like this i think the main thing is to really master your pitch i have had so many opportunities to speak to ad networks i mean i go to a lot of these business focused events and ad networks if they're not careful their pictures sound identical you know oh we can offer you traffic around the world from all of these different and it's like well what's the difference what do you do well what's your unique selling point this is kind of like really basic kind of business stuff but people forget to hone it and if you can actually go out and stand in front of the mirror before you enter the conference hall and say my ad network does this its unique selling point is this this is the reason why i should use it then when you go into a conversation with someone and they're like so what do you do you can just basically go bam and just hit them with some real hard facts or news like i don't know with news views about us yeah yeah i think it's just seizing

opportunities that like um when we were going around today when we were shooting our footage um we were stopping off at a couple of stalls just to do some some kind of like catch-ups and this guy just kind of like grabbed us he was like oh you're looking you're looking at my game you're looking at my stall oh amazing um so this is my game we've just launched today and and we were very busy and we're kind of like but it was actually you know fair play on him he was doing conferencing right you yeah yeah you need to look at who's around you think oh do they look interesting you really have eagle eye vision and look at people's lanyards and kind of say oh are you whoever and just kind of network smartly i guess and choose your battles we did a little thing last night at the mobile mixer which was available use the video you can see now which i suggest you watch because we go around talking to people and saying hey guys you want to talk to us for five minutes or so we ask a few questions we ask them for their advice on networking but anyone who appears in that video has already won yeah that's like kind of rule one someone comes up to you say hey do you

want to be in this video you say yes and there were people who said no there were people who said no and it is it is a shame because it's a missed opportunity that's something you can immediately tweet out and say hey i was on this video well it's just building your brand exactly and there's so many opportunities even outside of events i mean there's opportunities to like guest blog i mean i know that gamerbiz has guest blogs all the time from all sorts of companies and we're always on the lookout for kind of cool ideas and cool people to hear their opinions from but if you don't venture if you don't go forwards then you can miss out and i appreciate that not everyone is going to be a super hyper confident person and maybe they'll be feeling a bit nervous about it but if if you go to this conference and you say okay maybe i'm not that kind of person but if i can just do it once or twice and just do it with the right people even if for the rest of the day you go and hide in the toilets or whatever or you just basically just sit in the conference rooms for the rest of the day and don't talk to anyone else you can kind of say to yourself i've done really well and just by getting yourself out there like you say it gives you that stepping stone to getting noticed well

we're going to be doing a lot more of it tomorrow i imagine are we prepared or are we ready to collapse and die it's day one we're so prepared day one guys come on day one all right well we'll be back tomorrow for the second part of this little two-part diary uh come and follow us and subscribe to us and comment all that comic con you want woohoo subscribe