Asmo Halinen, one of the original three Apaja founders, has just announced through Jaiku that he is looking for new challenges. In other words, he has (or will resign soon) from Apaja’s services.

Apaja Online Entertainment is focused on creating community gaming websites under the name of Playray. The Finnish service is called Aapeli and is one of the most popular entertainment sites in Finland.

Apaja has recently gone through quite a bit of transition in its managerial positions. Inka Mero was the CEO for some time, before she left for maternity leave. Tiina Zilliacus took over after Inka as Apaja continued to expand its services abroad to Turkey and Hungary, to name a few countries. A year ago, 1.75 million euros were invested into Apaja by Martin Trigon Venture Partners.

We’ll see if we can get a word from Asmo on the reasons behind the decision and what those new challenges might be for this online game & community services heavyweight.

Asmo Halinen, Co-founder of Apaja, has compiled a listing of Finnish gaming companies into a rather comprehensive list. You can find the list here, and the original blog post about the project here (in Finnish).

Asmo started the list way back in 2005, but has updated it along the way, the latest update being from 16 July 2008. The list has 38 gaming companies altogether, a number which in itself amazes me. I’d be very interested about the ratio of ‘other startups’ vs. gaming startups in Finland, if anyone wants to compile such a ratio. And if that is not challenging enough I’d love to see the ratios from all the Nordic countries. I have yet to figure out why Finland has relatively such high numbers of gaming firms. Any ideas on this would be warmly welcomed.

Let us and Asmo know (via comments) if he’s missing anybody from his list.

Eero Aarnio, one of the most famous Finnish designers, has taken his work online to Playforia, the 3D virtual world created by Apaja. He created the timeless Ball Chair in 1963, which has been hugely popular around the world. Apaja, the company behind the casual gaming site, has built Playforia as part of their service portfolio to gather audience from the huge population living in online worlds. According to Asmo Halinen, one of the founders of the company, over 30% of the users in Playforia and Aapeli are over 30 year olds.

Apaja is venturing into the same direction as Sulake, who has done a lot of co-operation with 3rd party content suppliers in their Habbo Hotels. It’s definitely a feasible way of bringing in valuable content and creating that link between the virtual and real world that users normally crave for in some sense.

Disclosure: the author is a former employee of Apaja.