A Night with PlayRaven and Aalto Game Executive Programme

Lasse Seppänen, CEO of PlayRaven, started the night by explaining to us why strategy matters. Going into game design is a serious business. Saying we "just want to make games" is like saying "I just want to drive a car": it's vague and directionless.  Lasse's piece of advice is to work out the details and have people who can actually handle managing all these decisions:  It's not enough to just make games without this foresight.

 

The Game Executive programme at Aalto University: an intensive three-part "bootcamp" for game developers that combines insight on such topics like Financial Planning, Free-to-play, Asian markets, Branding, and Pitching.  During the evening, Saila Laitinen, Co-founder of Sfonge Ltd gave us a breakdown on the facts about China as a mobile market:  China has had the largest number of active smartphones in any country since 2013.  China's mobile game market is expected to maintain growth over the next three years, while the global game market growth drops slightly.  But what Laitinen warns us about is that the Chinese market is much different.  Here, there are four times more Android devices than iOS users, and double the revenue.   The channels for distributing Android games is fragmented between many different providers, including China Telecom's own channel, Play.cn, and almost a third of iOS players derive games from third party platforms instead of the official AppStore.  Because of expensive mobile data tariffs and bandwidth limits, and the popularity of low to middle end devices, games developed for the Chinese market need to take this limitations into account to deliver the smoothest game experience possible.

To conclude the talks for the night, Anca Agapi, program manager for Aalto University Executive Education gave a run through of the full programme and prices of the education program, open to all game developers, which is starting on October 29th 2014.  Afterwards, the participants enjoyed mingling and sponsored drinks courtesy of PlayRaven.