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 have spent the last ten weeks reporting into PG.biz and sharing a new video on their YouTube featuring comment from some of Europe's finest game makers. Here's week 10's 'final' episode (with a video below), but watch out for more bonus content from their many interviews with experts along the way.
And be sure to subscribe to their YouTube channel here to keep up with their latest content.
Jiri Kupiainen: And just like that, it’s day 70. We finished filming the final interview of the series in Copenhagen earlier today, and tomorrow morning we take the train back home to Berlin.
Doing this trip and show feels like a human experiment in time dilation - shooting our very first episode in Berlin nearly three months ago feels like it was yesterday, yes, but in some prehistoric “before” era. Now there's lots of anxiety in the air about how many house plants will have survived or whether our apartments have been taken over by squatters…
Traveling all around Europe like this is some kind of a budget version of flying to the moon and looking at all the rest of humanity sitting there on this little blue orb we inhabit. As we’ve traveled to Lisbon, Helsinki and back, the weather and food has certainly changed, but the people aren’t all that different. It’s the same with the games industry - after 40 or so interviews with CEOs and founders, you start seeing more similarities than differences.
A lot is changing with the platforms - the benevolent dictators - that have enabled the massive growth that the games industry has seen since the beginning of the smartphone era. While breaking up the platform monopolies is causing a lot of near term headache for most companies, most leaders agree that in the long run the increased respect of users’ privacy and freedom to choose are Good Things. There’s a sense of stagnation that came from following the LTV>CAC playbook and excitement for what comes next.
As we left the sunshine of Southern Europe and moved on to the central part, the topics got heavier. Last week we talked about the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the political and social responsibility that comes with being the largest developer in a region, and this week’s episode shot in Czechia continues with other heavy topics such as the international laws of armed conflict and how they apply to military shooters, and the role of games in potentially reaching true general artificial intelligence.
We spoke with Ivan Buchta, creative director with Bohemia Interactive at their office in Brno and Marek Rosa, founder of Keen Software House and CTO and CEO of GoodAI in Prague.
Filming stops tomorrow, but the show goes on. Over the next month or two we’ll continue to share the videos shot in Helsinki, Stockholm and Copenhagen, and I’ll start writing more about the lessons learned and what we as an industry need to do next, especially when it comes to tackling the twin crises of climate change and biodiversity loss. Running this show while continuing to do our day jobs hasn’t left much time for reflection, but I’m sure being back at home and not having to worry about the next interviews and reservations will make plenty of mental room for digesting all the great conversations from the past 10 weeks.
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, Week 8, Week 9.
