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 eight weeks into their campaign and each week they'll be reporting into PG.biz and sharing a new video on their YouTube featuring comment from some of Europe's finest game makers. 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: Traveling from Wroclaw to Helsinki overland is a pain in the ass, literally. After an 8+ hour train ride to Bialystok yesterday, today hours 7 to 23 are spent on a Flixbus snaking its way slowly through the Baltics. Luckily my bet that the Baltic states would have their mobile internet infrastructure in order seems to be paying off, so at least it’s productive. Nowhere near the comfort level of modern trains, but at least a big leap forward from the buses that used to frequent these Eastern European roads not that many years ago.
Polish companies weren’t keen to be interviewed, and the games industry in the Baltics is still in its infancy. This is why we’re powering through all the way to Helsinki in one go. Our next destinations Helsinki, Stockholm and Copenhagen have no shortage of great companies. Of course GDC is next week so many of the movers and shakers will be out of town but we're still expecting some solid interviews to wrap the tour with.
It takes hours of shooting to produce a few minutes of content - typically, an interview lasts an hour or more, and gets edited down to 10 minutes or less. This has resulted in the unusual situation that I get to listen to industry thought leaders talk for hours and hours, and I really need to pay attention to what they’re saying as we edit these clips. Even though we still have probably six weeks of content coming, I’m trying to start summarizing key findings in blog posts on the Matchmade blog since there are some clear themes emerging.
Our latest episode, shot in Zürich and Munich a bit over two weeks ago, went live today.
I’m happily surprised by the directions the interviews took - Bob Slinn from FunPlus spoke quite a lot more amount communities and creators than I expected, though what else should you expect from someone who spent years at Facebook.
And Hendrik Lesser from Remote Control Productions had way more political and value-oriented takes on building game companies than I expected, though again, I probably should’ve known to expect it from someone so active in the space where games and European politics overlap. Another solid episode!
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, Week 4, Week 5, Week 6, Week 7.
