While their 10 week quest to spread a message of sustainability while visiting games studios across Europe may be over, there's still plenty to learn and enjoy from the videos that CEO of Matchmade Jiri Kupiainen and GamesForest.Club's Maria Wagner made along the way.
We followed them week by week - click here to see the series in full - as they documented their travels with exclusive video interviews with the big-name studios they visited.
Their message is a simple one. Unless we all get smarter about the necessity and logistics of our business travel, the global turnaround in CO2 production that we're all praying for isn't going to happen.
Here's part two of their video from Sweden, featuring Johan Sjöberg, CEO of Star Stable Entertainment and Gustav Martner, head of creative for Greenpeace. And don't miss Part 1 here.
Jiri Kupiainen: "How do you make the transition to a more sustainable life, career or a company? “It’s like exercise” says Gustav Martner of Greenpeace. "You start with five pushups, not by signing up for the Ironman competition." Gustav knows what he’s talking about, having built a very successful 20 year long career in advertising before joining Greenpeace as their Head of Creative and storming the stage at Cannes Lions to return his award.
We’ve asked tens of company leaders for 10 Weeks to Save the Games Industry about their companies’ sustainability initiatives and have heard replies ranging from “we sort our garbage” to “we comprehensively account our emissions and compensate them with a trustworthy partner”. It would be easy to get frustrated because so many companies aren’t doing enough - but maybe the right way to look at this is that every game company we met with is doing something and wants to do more.
Throughout the trip, we had discussions about best ways to use the reach of games to raise awareness. The consensus seemed to be that doing this gets harder as soon as you involve the development team, but that at least for mobile games using the live operations infrastructure that’s already in place could be very straightforward. Maybe donating underutilized ad space inventory to Greenpeace for some climate-positive stories is the five pushups that puts mobile game studios on the Ironman track for fighting climate change?
In this second part of the Sweden episode, we talk to Johan Sjöberg (CEO, Star Stable Entertainment) about his 36 year career in the Swedish games industry and how the company has succeeded in the "impossible" task of creating a subscription MMO RPG for teenage girls, after which we head to Gothenburg to visit Gustav Martner (Head of Creative, Greenpeace) on his 125 year old oil tanker and learn how he transitioned from his very successful 20 year career in advertising to crashing the stage at Cannes Lions for Greenpeace.
The 10 weeks video series is soon coming to an end with only one or two episodes left after this one - so that’s our first five pushups almost done. But fighting climate change is of course a team sport, so next we’ll have to figure out how to bring the entire industry together instead of everyone working on their separate emissions calculators while sorting out their recycling.
