It’s undoubtable after Supercell’s $1.5 billion raise that Finland is a country of mobile gaming. We have the big players, like your Supercells and Rovios, but attending any gaming event in Finland your realize there’s an amazing long tail of smaller studios kicking out innovative titles. With that in mind, it’s somewhat surprising there isn’t a Finnish game publisher to rule them all.
The logic behind a games publisher is that game developers are great at building games, but the act of publishing, marketing, and fine-tuning after a release is an entirely different beast where it’s easy to lose momentum. So instead of sending your game to the app store yourself, going through a publisher you can take advantage of some cross-promotion benefits, mentoring, and expert handling.
Rovio is acting more and more as a publisher these days, with their Rovio Stars program that has released a few games. Additionally in Finland we’ve covered the Finnish launch of Playground Publishing, which opened an office here.
Another name to add to the list is Fingersoft, the Oulu-based creator of the hit Hill Climb Racing, is is expanding their role as a publisher as they announce they will launch their second third-party title, a new action game by Viima Games called “Fail Hard”. The game puts a wannabe stuntbike rider into some difficult situations to combine some comedy with physics-based action.
“Fail Hard has a great set of elements we like to see in mobile games. Not to mention that with Viima Games, we also found a capable and passionate team to hang out with,” says Jarkko Paalanen, Business Development Director of Fingersoft.
Previously Fingersoft saw good success by publishing Benji Bananas, created by the Finnish game developer, TribeFlame. Today Fingersoft says it gets over half a million daily downloads as a publisher, totaling 130 million downloads total.
So will Finland get a dominant games publisher? Time will tell, but it will be interesting to see how these players take advantage of the booming Finnish gaming ecosystem.
