BEER, WHISKY AND POCKET GAMES—AND LUNCH FOR THOSE WITH ACCESS
September 16, 2023, 13:00 pm |Business, Feature, Subscriber Content
Pocket Gamer Connects Helsinki, held between Sep. 12-13, helped the gaming industry to connect, but some had trouble getting lunch after paying hundreds for tickets. Free drinks flowed almost effortlessly, though.
Text and Photographs: TONY ÖHBERG/FINLAND TODAY
Lunch was served in brown paper bags, but now, for one reason or another, every bag included leafy greens and chicken.
This made those game developers who had requested vegetarian options shaky. Some just came from a lecture titled “Passion & Pesetas,” and now all they had available to sustain their energy levels during the busy day of networking and listening to experts was coffee and energy drinks to sip.
Interestingly, the VIP room served anything from Tempeh to Salmon, but would the lunch have been worth 1,500 euros?
That’s what I was told the VIP badge cost at the Pocket Gamer Connects Helsinki—a two-day conference held between Tuesday and Wednesday at Wanha Satama exhibition center in Helsinki’s Katajanokka district.
“It’s not just the lunch,” said one of the members of the conference crew. “People pay for access to the room.”
“Your pass is worth, maybe, a few hundred euros,” the crew member snorted while observing my media pass.
When I earlier interviewed Dave Bradley, COO of Steel Media, the company behind Pocket Gamer, in the back of the VIP section, a quick look around revealed that the area was half empty with a few people here and there typing furiously on their laptops or fingering their mobiles.
No alcohol was served. But on the day before, the gamers had shown us how to drink.
A man dressed as a mascot for a game called Walkspace introduces a potential patron to the mobile game where you don’t play actively, but instead gain process by walking. Photograph: TONY ÖHBERG/FINLAND TODAY
At the afterparty at Maxine nightclub in the Kamppi district on Tuesday night, where after a long day of conferencing one could, as advertised, “finally let the hair down,” the Killers, Socializers, Explorers and Achievers—the four archetypes of gamers—were roaming around alongside game developers and designers with drinks and one dollar bills in hand. At first, we thought the bills were part of a game. Maybe they were all playing some twisted live-action Monopoly?
“Can I get a beer, please,” my assistant asked a barman.
“That would be eight euros,” said the bartender after handing the brew in a pint roughly the size of a milk glass.
“What? I thought these drinks would be free!” my assistant exclaimed.
“They are. For those who have the access,” the bartender said with no smile on his face and started mixing a drink to the next person in line with the talent of a soda jerk.
A bankroll of one dollar bills gave you plenty of drinks. Photograph: TONY ÖHBERG/FINLAND TODAY
Through our “paid lesson” we quickly learned from a game dev that the one dollar bills would be our tickets to buying a tray full of hard liquor. They were handed out by a lady at the door. We were not going to miss her again.
But not everyone swilled down drinks with both hands. People who sipped nothing but water included Victor Göransson, an account executive in an AI company in Sweden.
“The gaming community here in Helsinki is very strong,” he said and smiled, which was a nice contrast to the murky bartender. “The gaming culture in Sweden is more scattered. And Sweden focuses more on PC games while Finland has a stronghold on mobile games.”
Dave Bradley is the chief operations officer at Steel Media, a U.K.-based company that organizes Pocket Gamer Connects events not only in Helsinki but also in places like London and Jordan. Here, Bradley poses in front of Wanha Satama exhibition center dating back to the 19th century on September 13, 2023. Photograph: TONY ÖHBERG/FINLAND TODAY
On the next day after hurrying behind COO Dave Bradley, a man in his mid-50s but with the fast legs of a young game dev, past angry glances at the door of the VIP room in Wanha Satama, Bradley called Finland “the hotbed of pocket gaming.”
“Given the size of the population and the number of game studios and games being released, Finland makes the most money from video games in the world,” Bradley said. “I believe there are 266 game studios in Finland. That’s a lot. Even the Middle East wants to emulate Finland’s success.”
“But why are pocket games, especially, so successful in Finland when playing on PCs seems more popular, for example, in Sweden?” the journalist wondered.
“I would never bet against the device that everyone’s got,” Bradley said while pointing at his mobile.
A big reason is the Finnish mobile manufacturer Nokia’s commitment to digital phones in the 1990s, which helped it become the best-selling mobile phone brand in those days. In July 1999, more households in Finland already had a mobile phone than a landline telephone.
“Today, almost everyone is a gamer,” Bradley said.
