The Finnish mobile games market is going through another cycle today: teams founded by people from console development studios appear on the local stage one after another.
Photo: Futurefly
As our colleagues from Nordic Game Bits write, there are especially many companies coming from Remedy, known for the Max Payne and Alan Wake series (for example, it recently became known about the emergence of Futurefly, founded by the former head of the trademark development department at Remedy Entertainment, Oskari “Ozz” Hakkinen).
However, a significant outflow of personnel, according to the founder of Neogames KooPee Hiltunen, indicates not the problems of a large company, but the desire of many just to try themselves in something new.
Stuart MacDonald, a leading Playraven artist who previously worked at Remedy and Rockstar, sees the reason for the outflow a little differently. According to him, developers in large companies are usually involved in more than a 4-year development cycle. That’s a lot. Therefore, they have an understandable desire to shorten the development cycle. The transition to mobile development, where the cycle is much shorter, is a logical step.
Companies founded by such defectors, Nordic Game Bits calls second-level startups (second round startups).
One of their main advantages compared to conventional startups is that it is easier for them to get venture financing (their founders have the necessary connections and a portfolio that can be shown to funds or “angels”).
Plus, by itself, the presence of specialists who have passed the school of AAA development increases the chances of success of the project. Including for the reason that the creators of large console projects are accustomed to pay special attention to pre-production, the basis on which the project is based.
“Even within the framework of a more modest-sized development, pre-production can reduce a lot of time, becoming a visual compass for all future design changes,” McDonald notes.
The funny thing is that partly due to this migration (as well as a number of other factors, including the growth of device capabilities and content requirements), which, of course, is happening not only in the Finnish industry, mobile games are increasingly beginning to resemble “big” projects.