Thorbjörn Warin Joins Grand Cru From Wooga

“It took me all of two minutes to decide to join the company when I saw the gameplay,” says Thorbjörn Warin, the newly hired head of Marketing for Helsinki-based Grand Cru, the creators of their upcoming release, Supernauts. Warin had previously worked as head of marketing for Wooga, but left in September of last year to take some time off and do freelance consulting for startups.

Compared to moving to Berlin from Stockholm, he found moving to Finland much easier and friendlier.

“It’s really been a dream. Everything is a little more Scandinavian up here. You get your digital number and you can do stuff online. In Germany you always have to carry around a folder of papers and wait in line. Very few people speak English when you have to deal with the government.”

It’s taken him “about two and a half days” to get up and running with bank accounts, mobile phones, apartment stuff, and so on. As an expat myself, we both agreed the Scandinavian countries absolutely are more business friendly when it comes to these matters. English penetration in the Finnish bureaucracy is also a much more helpful defining factor compared to Germany.

Warin joined Wooga actually in a very similar situation to where he’s joining Supernauts right now. I was person number 12 coming in after closing initial funding, and kind of the first person on board taking care of marketing and business development stuff and build that up.

This new position will not just be moving through the same motions as at Wooga though, now there is a much stronger focus on mobile platforms. On dilemma I’m sure every marketing director would be happy to have is figuring out Supenauts’ multiplatform strategy. This involves deciding the best strategy of where to launch, when to launch, and what the big picture is.

“We have a game and technology that can run seamlessly across Android and iOS, so now we just have to focus on what’s the right mix for us, and what the priority is,” says Warin.

Right now the game directors at Grand Cru are nailing down exactly what they want to be. The technology and backend are completely figured out, but they still haven’t decided what the best gameplay options they could put in the game.

“It could be a hardcore player vs. player thing, it could be a very casual thing, it could be a complete single player build-your-own-world experience. It’s such a cool sandbox-y type technology that we have. It’s a luxury problem, what kind of awesome game do we want to make?” says Warin.