Posts tagged:

game industry

The Sampo 3D Animation Film Aims Big

by Miikka Kukkosuo, March 17, 2010 — Leave a Comment

The Finnish film industry is looking more and more lively nowadays. The international successes have not been that many in the past, compared to e.g. the Swedish movie industry focused on strong story telling, like the recent Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Saga. However, in the past few years the Finnish industry has been showing signs of much increased international ambitions. One of the most widest distributed Finnish films ever has been the animation Niko & The Way to the Stars, published in 2008.

The next big take seems now to be The Sampo, a feature length 3D stereoscopic animation film based on the Kalevala mythology by Northern Digital Film Company NDFC Helsinki, founded in 2006.

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The Game Industry In Flux

by Miikka Kukkosuo, March 5, 2010 — 5 Comments

Those following the mobile gaming industry paid notice that the Finnish gaming studio Universomo was shut down (in Finnish) by its owner THQ Wireless, which acquired the Finnish firm back in 2007. Rumors started to spread on Tuesday this week and pretty soon THQ confirmed the liquidation of the studio. This is part of a bigger shift in the game industry.

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Lapland Studios First Finnish Game Studio To Design For Nintendo Wii

by Antti Vilpponen, June 25, 2009 — Leave a Comment

Lapland Studio logoKauppalehti had a good article on one of the less known Finnish game studios, Lapland Studio. They are a small game studio located up in Rovaniemi, Finland and are designing games for many platforms, from mobile phones to the latest new market Nintendo Wii. The company was founded in 2004 and has a revenue of about 420 000 euros for year 2008. They have been steadily growing and avoiding creating too much loss as they grow, the largest loss in 2007 worth less than 10 000 euros.

Lapland Studios has been previously providing outsourcing services to advertising agencies, film studios as well as some game developers. They also have two seperate subsidiary companies; Mine Studios and Inaria Interactive. Mine Studios concentrate on mobile games while Inaria Interactive will expand into the console gaming market.
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Unity Technologies Eases 3D Game Development for iPhone and Wii

by Miikka Kukkosuo, December 31, 2008 — 1 Comment

Unity Technologies is a Danish gaming technology startup. They provide tools for creating visually-rich 3D downloadable, online, iPhone and Wii games, or other interactive content like as architectural visualizations or real-time 3D animations. The company is based in Copenhagen, but has an international team and a sales office in San Francisco.

The company’s main product is Unity multi-platform game development tool, including a 3D game engine, which enables developers to create cutting-edge 3D content supposedly faster and more efficiently than with other tool sets. The Unity editor only runs on Mac OS X, but it can be used to produce games for Mac, Windows 2000/XP/Vista, Nintendo Wii, and iPhone. In addition, it’s possible to publish a web game played inside a normal web browser from the same project, the visual fidelity being identical to the standalone version. This is achieved by the company’s own Unity Web Player Plug-in for the most common web browsers. The plug-in is said to be already distributed in “6-digit” numbers.

Over the past couple of years, the company has gotten lots of new clients from indie and small shop developers, and a few high-profile customers including Disney, Sony Motion Pictures, and Cartoon Networks. Unity has been used in games, advergaming and edutainment projects, and technology demos. There is quite impressive a variety of games (latest best).

The company promises to combine usability, power, and platform reach in their tools, and seems there is user support for the claim as well. The framework is said to have built-in fallbacks and workarounds to provide solid support for almost all hardware and software combinations. It also presents features like Live Preview for playing the game exactly as it is and do real-time modification, Click to Publish to build the game with one click and running it with another, even directly on an iPhone. Unity also claims that with their tools the developers get the best out of iPhone, “consistently beating GL ES benchmarks by 30-40%.” However, while Unity has features supporting ease of use, like drag-and-drop, it’s still script-based programming tool, so not perfectly suitable for purely visual designers alone.

Unity Technologies is a technology company by heart, they state they’re “all about building technology, driving it forwards, and supporting it.” The company offers the tool with a standard licensing model, differentiating between small developers and companies with turnover in above USD 100,000.

Unity probably finds the biggest market within smaller indie developers and in different special projects (like WolfQuest and Axe Billions), while the big companies most likely will keep using and developing their own tools. Considering the real mass-market, online web gaming, the web plug-in works neatly, but the biggest drawback is exactly the need for it. It’s not possible to install new plugins in many of the public or workplace computers, even though the installation of the Unity plug-in is quick in itself. Gaming sites offering Flash-based games have become hugely popular due to the fact the Flash plug-in is available in pretty much all main browsers. Breaking into the mass-market will thus be difficult. Also, the market for in-browser 3D gaming is still relatively small compared to casual 2D games. There’s also competition, like Adobe ShockWave and services like InstantAction competing for the hardcore gamers. In iPhone game development, on the other hand, it will be interesting to see what kind of customer base Unity is able to get.

If you want to check out a demo, see Unity’s Tropical Paradise browser demo.

Valve Setting Up A New Social Gaming Company Tweehouse

by Ville Vesterinen, September 24, 2008 — 1 Comment

We wrote earlier that the Finnish Internet Agency Valve was up to something in the social gaming arena. Now we have found out that they are setting up a new firm that produces end-to-end social gaming solutions for large brands. The new company is called Tweehouse (Pronounced as a little kid would pronounce ‘tree house’). The games, described as more game like with a storyline than for example Habbo, are aimed at the younger end of the gaming market.

Tweehouse will be set up in partnership with Snap TV, a Santa Monica-based game company that “produces and develops interactive games for media-savvy kids”. Valve will own 50 percent of the venture while Snap TV owns the other half. There are no third party investors involved at this point.

Tweehouse will target purely US market in the beginning. For this Snap TV is an ideal partner to handle the Sales and PR and leave the game development and pipeline management to the Helsinki office. Snap TV prides itself for having a dedicated sales force that calls on all classes of retail and ships products to over 20,000 storefronts across the United States and Canada, thus enabling quick access to market when the product is ready. This is where many other services coming from Europe have fallen short when trying to enter the US market with only a PR agency or a two man office talking to the market.

Tweehouse was born when Valve and Snap TV realized they could actually build a product out of what was initially only a single project. This is a great way for any digital agency to test the market and see what works. I hope we will see more of this type of ’spin-offs’ coming from the Nordic and Baltic countries.

The business model will build on the end-to-end solution. The service covers everything from design, development and marketing all the way to running the platform and moderation of the games themselves. In essence Tweehouse is aiming to build and sell solid gaming platforms to their customers. In addition to a fixed price element, the company also aims to always build an upside to the products they sell. This could mean for example a revenue share model that will be a percentage of each game sold.

Tweehouse has so far only one full time employee, but their first project will soon see around 10 people working on it coming partly through Valve and partly as new hires. Paavo Perttula is currently running the company as its Chairman of the Board. Tweehouse should have their first game out after a year, but they are looking into getting another client project in as soon as late spring 2009.

Valve Recruiting Game Developers, Expanding To US

by Antti Vilpponen, September 22, 2008 — Leave a Comment

Valve logoThe Internet Agency Valve has been all quiet about its plans, but there is something going on about its operations abroad. The agency is a famous flash house in Finland, that has hogged numerous awards from many different competitions. It seems like they have something going on in the US at the moment, more specifically San Francisco.

Valve is recruiting game developers and game designers with the work being located either in Helsinki, Finland or San Francisco, US. A guess is that they are looking towards some sort of Flash based social game as they emphasize the need for “good up-to-date understanding of social networks and web-trends“.

I’ve heard from an industry insider that the person pulling together team is a former Sulake employee. Sulake is the house behind the world famous Habbo Hotel. An educated guess is that Valve is planning something similar, with a different target market perhaps?

Finnish gaming companies come in large numbers

by Ville Vesterinen, August 19, 2008 — 5 Comments

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.