Finnish Gaming Industry: 165M Euros and 1200 Employees
Those are the strategic figures of the Finnish gaming industry at the moment. Last night, prime time news in Finland covered the gaming industry in proper spotlight and outlined a few key figures of the industry. This year, the gaming industry is expected to generate 165 million euros in revenue and in doing so they employ 1200 people. Despite this somewhat significant size of the industry for such a small country, it has yet to see any real public acknowledgement from media at large or politicians. The downside of all this is that there are very few schools who teach anything related to the games industry.
The background of the gaming industry is in the demo scene of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Much of this is thanks to organisations such as Assembly, which is a large LAN party organised in Hartwall Areena here in Finland. Annually, it gathers thousands of passionate computer geeks to code and showcase their work over a weekend. One of the founders of Assembly is actually Jussi Laakkonen, the founder of Applifier, a cross promotion platform to promote games and other applications on Facebook.
All in all, the games industry in Finland is becoming the largest cultural industry in Finland. Furthermore, it was said in the news story that the gaming industry in Finland is also the largest in the Nordics.
A concrete example of game companies pushing the boundary forward is Supercell launching Gunshine.net to Facebook today. According to Ilkka Paananen, the CEO of the company, Gunshine.net is the first real multiplayer game on Facebook.
Paananen also believes that the tablet revolution is going to disrupt the social games market further. According to him, this will give huge opportunities for smaller developers to take market share from the more established players. Supercell launched Gunshine.net at Slush 2011.
Image by Ian D
Only 165m for the whole industry? That's a downer.
If the Angry Birds has been downloaded +500m times, I don't consider 165m a stagering number (0,33€ per Andry Birds game). Especially when we're talking about the whole industry, not one company.
Just for fun facts, patent offices alone in Finland made 170m ( http://bit.ly/u2PoBW ) and cleaning ladies 1 854m ( http://bit.ly/tnNXQO )
Once the gaming industry makes more money than a single phonebook directory ( http://bit.ly/uIV1aT ), politicians might start taking it more seriously.
The profitability is worth noting. 137 500€ per employee is nice number to look at. This hints that there must be a lot of fluctuation in anual revenues or that it's really hard to find more employees.
The future looks bright with the changing market place and all these (new) cool gaming companies innovating in the space.
Let's keep busy building the leading hub of game industry here in Finland.
Since Neogames and namely me is the one to blaim about those figures, some explanation might be on place. This estimate 165 million of turnover dates back to march 2011 and is based on those figures and estimates we had then. We havent updated that estimate since that, but is likely that it is exceeded.
Rovio is of course big part of that figure, but maths are not that easy. Let's say that there are lot of other companies which are growing fast. Please notice that our estimate is the turnover of the industry, not the value of whole value chain.
Anyway, I see this only as starting point. Lot of good things is happening and I hope that our predictions will be wrong in this ame way also in future.