The 10 Weeks To Save The Games Industry campaign continues. Matchmade CEO Jiri Kupiainen and GamesForest.Club's Maria Wagner are sustainably travelling around Europe spreading the message to games makers and communities that we all need to get serious about what we can all do to help save the planet.
The 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 simply isn't going to happen.
The duo are now four weeks into their campaign and each week they'll be reporting into PG.biz and sharing a new video on their YouTube. Here's the latest episode (with a video below). Be sure to subscribe to their YouTube channel here to keep up with their journey.
Jiri Kupiainen: It’s 18 degrees and sunny in Lisbon, which makes me very aware of the fact that next we’ll start making our way towards the Nordics, reaching Helsinki four weeks from now. I think about this a lot because the main landing corridor for the Lisbon airport goes directly over the city - it’s about 1.5 tons of CO2e per head for one Helsinki-Lisbon return flight, or the entire climate-compatible annual emissions budget of a single person. I haven’t done the math on our trip yet, but I would estimate we’re clocking in at less than 10% of that due to only using trains and buses for this journey.
Buses were a bigger part of getting to Lisbon than expected. First there was a rail strike in France so we ended up taking a bus from Marseille to Barcelona, and then it turned out that the Portuguese railways are on strike for two weeks, so the bus it was again for the Madrid-Lisbon leg. As a person whose idea of bus travel mostly comes from the early nineties, the nine hour bus ride here was a pleasant surprise in terms of how comfortable modern buses are.
A big part of this trip for me is having the pressure to produce a solid 30 minutes of video content every week like clockwork, so that I can better understand how life is for the creators that we work with at Matchmade. We’re getting better at it, but I would estimate 30 person-hours goes into editing and producing a 30 minute episode. So doing a couple of nine hour bus rides really helps there - this would be significantly harder to do with my regular zoom-to-zoom work schedule.
The second part of our London episode, which went live a week ago, got significantly fewer views than we hoped for. This really bummed us out, because the interviews with María of ustwo and Hilmar of CCP were highlights of our week in London & really worth watching - but such are the the ways of social media. Content for the content god, may the algorithm be merciful!
The Paris & Marseille episode went live a couple of hours ago (below) and seems to be doing better. As someone who strongly dislikes clickbait link texts, I can’t help but wonder how much THE DEATH OF HYPERCASUAL is contributing to the views.
But clickbait or not, it’s very much worth watching. Anouar, the former CMO of TapNation and now CEO and founder of Quiet had a different perspective on what’s happening with hypercasual and provided great actionable ideas for what the games industry can do to tackle climate change. We also had a great chat with Rémy Bompar, strategy & operations manager at The Sandbox about how web3 games are becoming more sustainable by switching off proof-of-work blockchains. And finally Maarten Noyons, who founded the International Mobile Gaming Awards, had some great perspectives to share from the early days of mobile gaming and how they compare to what we’re seeing with the metaverse today.
We’re also getting more comfortable being on the screen ourselves, kicking off with crucial seagull-related tips for anyone planning to visit my hometown Helsinki in the future.
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To catch all the episodes so far head to their YouTube here and find out more about their journey so far here: Intro, Week 1, Week 2, Week 3.
