This live story refers to the awards on Tuesday, August 18th 2020. You can still rewatch the Finnish Game Awards stream in the YouTube recording below, and the discount offer to Finnish studios is valid until the end of the week...
Finland remains the spiritual home of the mobile games industry, which is why we've been hosting an annual conference there since 2014. The games industry in Finland is worth over €2 billion, and continues to grow. And on Tuesday, August 18th 2020, the community will gather - online! - to celebrate the best and brightest from the region in the 25th edition of The Finnish Game Awards. The Finnish Game Awards is organised by the Finnish Game Developers’ Association and Neogames Finland and sponsored by Finnish studios.
You can watch it right here in the YouTube livestream, and we hope it inspires you to join our own online Finland-flavoured event in September (details below).
Online from Helsinki
This 25th anniversary year has been unusual in many ways, so the annual ceremony of The Finnish Game Awards will be celebrated completely differently than before. Starting at 18:45 Finnish time (16:45 BST), awards will be handed out, including the Finnish Game of the Year award which will be the evening's ultimate highlight.
The advantage of hosting it all online - as well as the obvious health benefits of social distancing - is that the show can feature new types of programme not seen at The Finnish Game Awards in previous years. In addition to the ceremony on the main stage, the event will consist of interviews with game industry luminaries and a newsroom featuring highlights from over the past quarter of a century. The evening will be opened by the Finnish orchestra Game Music Collective, and hosted by Katja Ståhl. Watch the stream here:
The shortlists for the awards can be viewed at the Neogames website. You can follow the event on social media using the hashtag #fga20.
The Finnish game industry traces its history back to the founding of the game studios Housemarque and Remedy 25 years ago in 1995. Game development already existed in Finland before that, but it had mostly been the work of single developers and hobbyists. The 2019 report by Neogames showed that the amount of people employed in the Finnish game industry exceeded 3000, and out of that number 27% came from outside Finland.
If you're a Finnish developer, you can benefit from a special PGC offer running just this week in honour of The Finnish Game Awards
According to data gathered by Neogames Finland, an association representing the interests of the Finnish game industry, 2019 was the sixth consecutive year when the Finnish game industry reached a turnover of more than €2 billion, and 2019 saw a 5% increase in comparison to the previous year.
"The 5% growth shows that the Finnish game industry is on a solid footing and the group of successful companies is larger than ever before,” commented KooPee Hiltunen, Director of Neogames Finland. "Fewer entirely-new games are published, as games are now more like services with a longer lifespan rather than single titles. The number of newly-founded game companies has also gone down, but the founders of new companies are now more experienced than they used to be.”
Celebrate even more at Pocket Gamer Connects Helsinki Digital
Following Tuesday's awards, to find out more about this vibrant games industry, please register for Pocket Gamer Connects Helsinki Digital, our own five-day conference taking place entirely online this year (so no need to book those plane tickets!).
Nearly 300 expert speakers from around the world sharing their knowledge over Zoom, 1,500 potential new contacts in the MeetToMatch platform, side events like Investor Connector and The Big Indie Pitch... it's going to be the must-attend conference of September. And if you're a Finnish developer, you can benefit from a special offer running just this week!
Buy two Finns, get one Finn free!
We want to encourage all great Finnish developers to attend and take part. So, exclusively for Finnish studios: if you buy three tickets together, you get the third one free.
It’s a special ticket type that runs online this week, to honour The Finnish Game Awards. Use this code (FinnishAwards342) to unlock the tickets, and benefit from basically a third off the mid-term price. Proof of Finnishness may be required.
