PG Mobile Mixer Stockholm: How Swedish entrepreneurship and caution is building the future
North, South, East, West; if there's a city containing mobile game developers, Pocket Gamer will be Mobile Mixering it at some point.
This week, our Air Miles took us to a sunny Stockholm to gauge the ambition of the Swedish mobile games community.
What did we learn? Swedish mobile game developers like mobile games, beer, and free Candy Crush Saga socks. Much like the rest of the world then...
Of course not.
Together with event sponsor King, we put together a top panel of Swedish mobile game experts to delve into the market's local and global dynamics.
So to our panelists - Ben Cousins from DeNA's Scattered Entertainment, King's games guru Tommy Palm, Mojang's bizdev guy Daniel Kaplan, and Rovio Stockholm's Oskar Burman.
Get to the talk talk
Kicking off the panel, I questioned...
Jordan: What are the key skills that you mobile developers are looking for?
Burman: It's monetization; what items should you be selling in your game, and at what price?
Cousins: I agree. There are about 25 people in the world who understand this. We have one, and I know you have one, Oskar. But it's not about experience per se. You need to have launched a couple of games, but it's about combining game design, monetization and analytics. We need a new term to describe them - maybe Store Managers.
Kaplan: More generally, we're looking for people who are multi-talented, with different skillsets.
Burman: It's funny because that's what it was like in the 1990s. People had to be able to do different things because teams were so small. More recently, when we had 300-strong studios, you could have someone whose entire job was eye shaders. We used to have that at EA. There was one guy who did eye shaders.
Cousins: I think the oldest and the youngest people in the industry are in the best position. You only need 30 people to be a success now. You don't need an eye shader guy in mobile, yet.
Jordan: In Sweden it seems the growth is coming from start-ups not the big studios like DICE, Massive and Avalanche. Is that good?
Burman: Yes. We're seeing this a lot with students now. They want to do it their own. And they have the example with companies like Mojang.
Kaplan: You have to remember that those companies you mentioned are all foreign-owned studios. For example, EA [DICE's owner] sends its profits to Switzerland.
Cousins: I think the Swedish education system encourages start ups. But it goes through phases. At the moment, people want to do start ups.
Jordan: Sweden has a relative high percent of women in its games industry (15 percent). Do your companies actively hire women?
Palm: It's a problem throughout IT. I think companies need to provide good role models for women. We have a lot of women leads at King, and we try to promote them as role models.
Burman: We're actively looking to recruit women. Not in terms of positive discrimination, but we've found we receive many high quality applications from women for our jobs. Our studio is 35 percent female, which is super important as our games are 50:50 in terms of gender split.
Cousins: It's not about positive discrimination. As Bing Gordon [ex-EA CCO] says, it's about the cycle of fathers' daughters. As the fathers make games, their daughters will get into the industry.
[Update: Cousins has since further explained this point, thus: "Male developers who have daughters make games for them. These games, designed to appeal to women, entice women to actually become developers. The games these female developers create are even more enticing for women, and encourage even more women to become developers. Virtuous circle".]
Jordan: We're in Stockholm. It's a great city, but does it have a long term problem in terms of the cost of living, even compared to other cities in Sweden like Malmo and Gothenburg?
Kaplan: The price of housing is a big issue.
Burman: Malmo is hot. Gothenburg not so much. When Rovio was looking at a location for its first studio outside Helsinki, we looked at Stockholm, Shanghai and San Francisco. Stockholm won because of the talent base, the then relative lack of competing mobile companies, and its proximity and cultural similarity to Helsinki.
Cousins: It is expensive here but there is no downside. After I moved here from London, I was waiting for years for something bad to happen - to get mugged, for the transport system to break down. It doesn't happen. At Scattered Entertainment, we're a distributed office, but we meet up regularly in Stockholm and over time we're relocated several people here because they like it so much. The quality of life is excellent.
Jordan: Okay, I've been nice to Sweden, but don't Swedes lack ambition? You build nice, semi-profitable companies, but you don't go and dominate world markets. Even the Finns are showing you how it's done.
Palm: For start ups, raising cash is an issue in Sweden. The Finns have sorted this, but I think that Swedes are excellent entrepreneurs.
Burman: Just look at DICE, Mojang, King. Swedes can build big companies.
Cousins: I think Swedish companies wait until they are profitable and then build on their success. In the US, this is reversed; you have an idea and build on it. Then try to get profitable. I've been impressed how King has build itself up one step at a time. That's much more healthy in the longterm.
