Panel: Finnish Gaming 3.0 - The Next Big Thing.

[Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you [Music] I'd now like off to work my first panel for stage we're looking at that was some Nitro games are talking about the next big things potentially now we're going to talk about the next big things uh in uh in in Finnish gaming so can I welcome our panelists who are waiting there come to Stage come on so hey everyone I'm suvi latva I'm a chief business advisor of neog games Finland and we are here today to talk about what's next big thing in Phoenix game industry and please do introduce yourself I'm the managing director of Helsinki games Capital I'm a basically a regional

developer here in the Capital Area hello I'm La sespanen I've been working on against for 25 years now maybe best known for Alan Wake uh back at remedy days and uh I've been four and a half years at supercell now everdale Heyday Boom Beach game lead and in my new role I'm ramping up co-development with external developers so come talk to me [Music] I am a design director at Lightner at the moment uh 13 years experience on mobile game design and uh glad to be here hi all my name is Sonia Angus Lev I'm the CEO of phantom game Labs which is a midcore mobile first developer I've also been in the industry for close to 20 years and besides being a CEO I'm also at the board of Remedy entertainment and also investing in some of the startups

nice to meet you all right okay so do you think that we are in the middle of or or in the middle of disruption at the moment or is it is it already here or are we on the edge is there a disruption and if yes do you think that could you please describe shortly like which are the biggest changes or Transformers at the moment so maybe Sonia you could start I don't actually believe that it's this is about disruption okay I've seen the development for Seoul so long that I think this is more of like Evolution and and you know taking um impact from like technical Trends as well as like market trends the industry is relatively youngish so there's also quite a lot of things also happening from the from the market and and the industry side but yeah I I think it's it's more about like evolution of tech and Industry is there any like a big things you know

Transformers do you can you can you recognize them or denying yeah I guess my my point is that it's um we easily focus on like one thing like yesterday it was web 3 and today it's AI but of course that's not the truth the truth is that there are a lot of different like simultaneous developments going on and it's it's more about like you know how do you react okay to the development thank you yeah I've see that as well that we are in the middle of kind of evolution it's a of course Ever Changing I've been 13 years in the industry on mobile games and it it's kind of gone from premium to free to play and uh then hyper casual are now kind of in the mobile as best the hybrid casual is kind of growing uh and of course there's feel free to play it's there it's just the audience is maturing and the new audiences have new

preferences of play and it's also something that we kind of have to uh acknowledge there is free to play isn't going anywhere we are still here I'm not dead yet so I'm not playing planning to die tomorrow so uh there's still space but it's quite um competed space so there's still lots of younger Generations there's uh people who grew on Roblox and uh epics or France on on fortnite and it's also something that will change that way that we should design our games for the and cater the younger audiences who are coming to an of an age that they pay their own Hobbies yeah I think the big huge transformation is going to be AI disruption usually in the industry comes from people making a new game or they might be disrupting the the marketing or whatever but I think AI is going to be available for all of the

parts of the chain like from ideation from concept art to making the game maybe you have a team of AIS I've already seen some people try that like you have a coder Ai and you have an artist Ai and so on um maybe you have a marketing AI allocating your budget eventually I don't know I think the then the the interesting part also is that AI can be applied everywhere it can be applied inside the games as well and the industry has been growing for a long time there are billions of people who play games which means that there are a lot of segments we could address and I think AI will give us the tools to finally sort of hyper segment and create maybe even individual experiences okay so yeah I totally agree and it's a part of semantics like is this normal or is gay Ministry always changing it's like part of semantics like it's a gravity problem like game industry business models have to reinvent

themselves or at least change somehow like every six months or so it's a it's not about a clear line but it's this is it this is game industry we changed all the time there's a new technology there's new restrictions new opportunities and we just it's gravity problem we can't fight against it we just have to roll with it literally so yeah we are always in change in middle of it exactly when you hear it here it's already a little bit late so you need to invent your new thing yourself um um I'm kind of feeling that we could be in the in the in some similar situation as we were at 2009 when that screens came and and digital distribution uh especially upstairs in Mobile but also on PC and it was a that was A disruption in in my opinion I don't know if you agree but um I'm just like uh my my initial thought was that if because that was kind of a great opportunity for many

Finnish developers and and that was kind of level up in Phoenix came industry quite heavily so uh I I was thinking that could this be similar uh situation or opportunity as there has been quite a lot of consolidation as you know that the competition is really hard and it's really hard to come as a small player or company to compete with with the big big giants and always when the market is changing it gives more uh might give a more opportunity for smaller developers but do you see any similarity uh compared to that time 2009 or or something maybe you know you could start no yeah well well obviously uh in in that sense that I think we here in Finland are in the finest Finland we are in the probably the best position to grab this opportunity we just think like that we don't want to fight with giants head heads on we just need to find our new

path and our own path so I think I believe this is a great opportunity and I think we'll become we will grow even greater thanks to this we don't like it's it's nice to have a change that's my five cents I think there's always always opportunity for differentiation and for different size of players and of course like the AI tools we I don't think we even like realize it how big the transformation will be and how everything will be transformed just simply everything interactive entertainment itself and how we make those games and of course it's a huge opportunity for one man two man three-person teams you know because you can you can replace that army of artists um that right now that requires a lot of capital like if you look at what Chinese game developers are doing there could be thousands of artists even in a single games company can I continue for that is the sound

that it would it it could sound that there is not no need for so many developers so because one one-man company can actually do the whole big game so is there going to be a big layoffs because of the AI I think it depends on the timing of course like this year there's going to be more limits to what AI can do but what about 10 years 20 years from now I don't know I I think for sure the skills needed will be different and whether everybody who is now working in games will be able to develop those skills I don't know okay yeah I hope you didn't forgot what you were no actually it's it is I see it always change is something that gives opportunities and uh when looking at the mobile space just fighting against the Giants is always really tough and it's really hard to see even the Horizon when you're in the midst of that that you try to find a new way to get into that really blood red

ocean and now when there is much more space it always gives more opportunities and with the AI tools and the tech it's really much more opportunities for smaller companies to come in I don't actually well how I see AI tools it's it's you still need kind of that understanding of games and understanding the kind of the tech behind it that you can use it as a tool uh but it really helps for a smaller team to build much bigger products and then there's this I think greatest example of a small team doing Miracles is a stumble guys you know you do a real-time multiplayer game and you just rock the app store and then you go to cross-platform it's something that you wouldn't do like five years ago it's that wouldn't be a tech that a small team could do that so it's there's lots of opportunities in the landscape right now and the design wise

but also just in the space because it's it's not only anymore that you are paddling with the two app stores because New Generation they require kind of friend play the multiplayer that they play with their friends that's what the kind of pandemic era taught us that people want to socialize and kind of seeing that that there's lots of lots of opportunities to be taken that's always it on the kind of design uh perspective and also please if you kind of uh want to comment to each other's it's it's okay like not me only like leading the conversation yeah okay I could actually add something because I think yes you can make games with smaller amount of people but you might still need 100 million dollars of uh marketing budget yeah to reach the people yeah everybody knows about your game yeah so so that that's the difficulty when you define like is it possible to make a small game company well a defined size does it mean you

have to have a huge amount of money but very few people yeah time to crack crack up your savings yeah definitely exactly exactly I like the thing that we will need in the future even more and I think what is a bottleneck in there in some sense in the growth is the game design thinking game design education like you need to think game design even you might have one person team who develops the whole game but you still need somebody to polish the AI results and you need good ideas good prompts just the game design thinking there in the beginning so that is definitely something I'm happy to work with game designers of Finland and we need definitely more and better game design education in Finland in general so I think that is what we need even more in the future Sonia what's your opinion on the consolidation versus uh yeah yeah so um how I see the industry it's uh well I

think last I already mentioned money so money has uh also quite an impact to the to the industry uh but also you know thinking of different different audiences like new GEOS uh or the like quickest growing um Revenue download GEOS Middle East Africa Latin America will have an impact on the whole whole theme uh streaming will have an impact on user genetic content will have an impact on the development so it's more about like yes one person can do something if you do larger like experiences or actually try to make viable business then I would say from the sense of like or perspective of mental health to actually have a team it's not healthy to have human a dog and AI yeah it's easy to have a conversation with AI

it's you know yeah there's no drama yeah no drama but so it's always like you know a question of what's your focus like yesterday I went to the um um game Jam 100 game Jam games uh uh Gallery like exhibition and um the the guy behind the 100 100K game say that yeah he is striving for his has been to make like non-commercial expressive uh games to different platforms so it's always a question of like perspective for for us it's about like actually making viable business so we can't just do the small scale I see actually that was a great point about team members because if you want to make a diverse game and you make it on your own with AIS it's probably not going to be very diverse yeah that's true um now we are talking about AI so how does it so in practice your in your work like now in your development or in your work in general or and and also I want

to know like how do you see it in in two three years maybe Jaco you could start now well now I well I use mostly AI for kind of pizza it's just prompt different pitches then I look at them and then then I do it do them again so it's kind of at least this brainstorming session it's pretty useful actually for that and um sometimes I I spy some some formulas for excellent but uh it's not on my line basically on design it's not that much I would love to do a bit more kind of uh visual prompting but um by artists are better at that because they have done a sick mindset they understand what they are looking for and that's something they can create something that I can't even like a bit prompting and it's it's just I feel a bit stupid but it's just not my

my kind of uh line of profession but then again when I look look at what really capable persons can do uh there's this uh blog Echoes of somewhere which is a great UC campaign and it's doing his own point-and-click adventure utilizing AI tools and it just looks like amazing one but one person can do with these tools and of course he's he really knows what he's doing and looking into the future you can see that that can be one game team if you have a couple of just designers and their professions and they have those tools they can create a lot more than them we can right now do but it still needs even in I'm not sure what happens in 10 years but it still needs that systematic thinking what we are looking for and to understand kind of the principles and uh maybe something that that I've been thinking because now ai is kind of that

extended theme that you have but what happens how you can enter a business that utilizes is used by AI that you would have you would always need that senior thinking that you have your kind of systematic thoughts on your profession and then you don't have any kind of Juniors who would grow to be in the business so that's that might be one challenge what we encounter in let's say 10 years time span how do you enter it how do you enter in the in this in this business yeah we so we use basically two maybe two answers first is we use it as an aid so GitHub gold pilot or GPT plus because of the uh I guess better handling of copyright issues or just

using our own raw materials but yeah so basically to to support both scripting and programming so like SQL scripting and programming I think that's the most useful use for us but yeah we have um we haven't gone to the like the assets or or or that side because of the copyright issue so we want to be very very clear um who is the owner of of content we are using and the other answer which is I'm a very very big believer of of personalization um now that it's uh harder and harder to get uh player Intel through user acquisition so I think it's it will be more important to learn about different segments within the game and also serve their gameplay preferences or

or you know way they they uh uh you know prefer to to go about whether it's more more social or more uh heavily uh rely on live Ops or or something like that then yeah so um real time speech NPCs or personal NPCs I'm a big fan of of that direction of development okay how do you see well supercell of course is a big company so there's a lot of AI stuff going on and also our parent company tencent is uh is working on a number of initiatives on Ai No Surprise everybody's doing that right now from like all across the board but one thing I wanted to bring up because there were good points about like the development itself already but what about the team leads or the producers and so on you know how many people here use Slack

so though the AI tools for Slack are coming this year I'm I'm personally like reading maybe 200 300 slack messages per day and that's going to be a huge relief if there's some way to like uh try to sort it better like what is important what is not important can I get a summary of This Thread and so on so so that's maybe something that I'm like personally looking forward to and uh and uh the I know that there's of course like Google Sheets Google Slides everything that is cloud-based uh and is used by by maybe not so much developers but the other people in the game teams all of that stuff will have ai integrate very soon yeah I have the question was how it shows in my work like personally I don't use AI AIS I'm a little bit Luddite there I I have to agree there's a lot of ethical things that this panelists know about that so let's keep that short but uh they're really AI is really interesting and nobody has idea how it

they're gonna change the game in the end but it there's a lot of exciting opportunities in general like I try to keep this short but there's a many many people have the dream to be the solo developer the one person who makes a game and Aya tools today provide a great tool to start that kind of plan iterate on your own ideas but still the air tools today need the Polish so you need to have in the beginning you need to have the game design thinking you need to think how you make game to even do the prompts and then you need to have the same sort of General net knowledge on everything like you needed earlier if you wanted to make game alone like you need to be able to polish the art polish the code publish the everything in this game so we are not yet there but it's going to be interesting and even today solo game designer again like do great Concepts on their own I believe but but I haven't done that yet I don't have a

time but like I said interesting near future that we have but still it needs a lot of off of human touch and love to actually make a game it's actually interesting that you can build a pitch it is kind of like a game yes to try to secure funding to make it actually like a game but it could be a playable and you could actually see it but it's supposed to look like yeah and but we just need to be really careful how much trash there's gonna be because of the auto Generations so I'm a little worried about that okay I I think I had quite many questions but you are talkative and it's good thing I I like that but I know that you have been prepared to answer something like 15 questions and I I think we have managed to go through five but okay um because I know to go faster and I know know that you're gonna talk long and I one thing I one question I want to make for you and make sure that I have a time for that so so uh the big

question is like how do you see what is the next big thing in the fitness game industry does it come from traditional game industry like mobile PC console or is it something like a something different or you you're you're kind of um um say that there is no distraction this is to say Evolution so is it going to be it's just like we are going to go through the same path as we have been so what is your vision Sonia could you start your your investor also you you are investing money so you must have a really Clear Vision like house okay it's gonna be my keywords uh mobile first because of the reads like Global reads and accessibility so mobile SD but it's mobile first not mobile only um I already mentioned streaming so I think building experiences for players it's even more like holistic than it well it hasn't really been that holistic so I

think it's leveraging the uh like different relevant channels and maybe the third keyword is uh yeah like Roblox type of uh um games within an environment I don't know what's the future of social Hangouts thing will be but I think it's sort of I think actually all of all of my points like sort of bring different channels together but the mobile will be the uh go to platform or window or how do you mean sorry is it like a platform or window where you kind of access so it's the easiest access point but I I'm very uh as I think usually mentioned in in his his talk that you know he believes in cross-platform me too but again mobile is the easiest way to get yeah to that direction okay yeah I I totally agree on that it's also when we look at the

players that come from come to an age uh that they spend their own money that I don't have to you know pay my weekly allowances in Roblox anymore uh but it is that this generation is really kind of used to that social environment and they used to also play on different uh platforms so it's it is what they've kind of the future generation of players uh kind of are used to if you ask a 15 year old kid uh so a game that's a single player experience they're like this is not even a game it is really different The View but it is and the streaming uh friendliness again if we look at stumble guys that they did uh exceptionally good job because they they had an innovation what they did somebody people tried to clone uh fall guys a lot on mobile but they just made a bad kind of

translations to that uh was designed the experience of mobile and that was basically that great Innovation it worked really well it was really well polished on mobile and then it could be really streamable it could and now it's actually on all platforms and competing against Fall Guys which is amazing so kind of that is the way that we should kind of go we need our condom to be streamable because that's where the audience is that's one big new industry actually kind of building up being being a streamer uh the Esports stuff just uh fun having fun of its friends showing that streaming that yeah this uh this audience is living in in kind of that kind of world that you you show things definitely you'll kind of Live help digital have digital Health real life kind of stuff but if you can play your

experiences with with the mobile or and um well in whatever kind of surroundings and you can play together but in here or then across the room it's all kind of part of that so I I think just echoing but yeah I think really really good points uh uh I think maybe from my my point I I heartedly agree and there's going to be a lot of change on that side and potential for disruption but I kind of I'm also an old-fashioned guy and old dude here I kind of believe that there is also the possibility of just somebody coming up with a really solid strong new brand like an IP you know Super Mario Style we had Angry Birds we had Clash of Clans who's gonna be next out of Finland I think that's that's also that opportunity is always there you know just make your game fulfill your dream use the tools that are available at the

time you know back 20 years ago they were different now they're different there's air what not but they at the at the end of the day there's always like this attraction of people finding something new like uh Eurovision actually really inspired me because garia with his silly Cha-cha-cha song um he actually broke through with the Finnish language song which is really amazing the people on YouTube were there like all those reaction videos and everything you know so you can do it just be different but you know you gotta find an angle that actually then resonates resonates with the people outside of Finland of course so I took the color green yeah it's a kind of believe in an IP and a phenomena yeah yeah but uh despite of which is the technological platform yes okay yeah yeah I totally agree with all the points points but I kind of have a hot take

here from my perspective as a regional developer like I don't care and I don't know what the next thing is gonna be it's it's your job and uh but what we can do is to help give you all the basics give you all the ideas give you all the possible directions spread them out and maybe you will find the new way between those pads and uh and uh I'm also also a martial artist and like everything is on there everything is on the everything stands on the basics so in in my opinion we need to really now here in Finland after the pandemic really emphasis on growing our own Talent helping up the students Paving the rocky way from school to their first job putting serious effort there like Mika CEO of of metacore said yesterday in leadership day that he would like to see the gay Ministry doubled here in Finland I would love that that inspired me so we really need to grow our put a lot of resources time

and effort to actually emphasis our own homegrown toilet there is a limited amount of crazies who want to move here in Finland I think we have talked with all of them already more are coming but but like we still need to grow our own talents here so the wrap it up is that the next big thing 3.0 iscaria with steroids with the AI and and it's mobile first properly yes directly from school yeah okay okay that's it there you have it you have the recipe Converse for our panelists please we are we've made up a little bit of time but you know I don't mind being late does anybody have a question for this amazing panel here there's a lot of you out there um oh you're very shy aren't you it's okay you can ask some more later I have one question because um oh those are a question no I have one

question that there's 232 studios in the last Neo games report sorry 232 students yes yeah how many of those are kind of young you're all young obviously but I mean like within the first year or two of their of their how many of those are startups I think there are something like 40 new new startups doing so 40 so almost 20 of the yeah and then those uh young startups there are like um experienced people behind yeah they're serious lack of support for like a new like first-time entrepreneurs and like new end so that's what that's what you need that's the biggest what I need is first time so you're getting you're getting that's fine but you need new talents we are constantly discussing about this but I think it's not easy to access uh like as a first-time entrepreneur like without not working at the industry are

there any first-time entrepreneurs out there any first-time people start in studios put your hand up you are you how many how many people out there are you finding it hard to get support or are you just doing it oh yeah that's right there we go we used to have the funding I mean the tech I mean Tech is still a thing or that is that I advise you to get a job and then then all right get a job I won't push it um maybe one comment one comment yes so there are always like Founders teams so if you consider finding a company remember to bring those like sort of uh more fresh talents in so it's not always the old yeah folks like exactly us youngsters so we need I need a chance yeah I totally agree combination of of young minds because you know we are getting old fantastic okay thank you so much please for my panelists I shall let you Move Along

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