Above: Kids playing GameFounders titles
GamesBeat: I remember Supercell saying that half the people they hire now are from outside the country. You don’t need an incubator in Finland anymore. You need it in other countries to feed them.
Bragiel: Finland’s been going at it for 20 years. Remedy is 20 years old now. They took a lot of time to build it up, but they had a couple of companies that kept on growing and growing, and now it’s outgrowing the country. It’s not only Supercell. Rovio was the same thing. Next Games has a lot of team members from Latin America. You’re pulling in talent from everywhere.
Ugand: It’s obvious. When we’re in our three-month cycle, say we have 35 or 40 people from all over the world. You really see how the different talents come from different regions, how they approach things differently. Then they start mixing and matching and helping each other. This international environment helps them develop their products a lot better.
GamesBeat: Are you starting to pay attention to what countries need more game companies given the talent they have?
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Ugand: Our vision is to have one pod per region. We don’t want to go crazy and have Game Founders Malaysia, Game Founders Singapore, and so on. We feel that because we’re working with a whole region, we don’t want to eat up our own market.
Bragiel: We’ll recruit harder in certain countries, though. If we see that a region’s on fire, we want to work with those young people. It’s in our best interest. We’re businesspeople as well. We work in a bunch of countries besides Malaysia. We saw a lot of game companies and a lot of computer graphics talent. We said, “Okay, there’s a good base here. Singapore not so much. Indonesia is very big and scattered. There’s a potential for a good hub here to draw in talent.”
Ugand: The government had a similar vision. It matched really well. They want to elevate their industry and they realize the way to do it is to bring in some international flavor. There are already some international companies establishing there. We were in sync at the right time.
Bragiel: I had a meeting with the prime minister last year where he said, “Why don’t we have more entertainment stuff here?” I said, “We can fix that.” It’s cool when you see some of these countries have a real top-level vision. Resources come with that. Look at Finland. That’s a top-level thing. A lot of money went in there.
Ugand: [Finland has] had an official strategy for developing the game sector for almost 10 years. It’s kind of ridiculous. It takes a longer-term vision.
Above: GameFounders’ final session for its fourth class on Talinn beach
GamesBeat: What do you think about job creation in games? Studying tech for a long time, there were books like Regional Advantage, about Boston versus Silicon Valley and why Silicon Valley won. It was more of a startup mentality here, versus the big corporations in Boston, and the startups had the advantage. I wonder if you can apply some of that same thinking to games. Which regions are going to win? Which regions need help? Where can you do the most good? A lot of ideas could affect where you want to invest.
Bragiel: Yeah, things like a critical mass of people. Also, if there’s not too much noise. In some places there’s already a dominant industry. Why is there not more tech going on? Because there’s already a big, dominant industry. You have to go to a place where you have a fresh, clean slate, and where there’s resources behind you. Silicon Valley won in part because a ton of government money came in here. It was a 60-year project in the making. You look at a region like Israel, with a lot of military spending concentrated. That took 20 or 30 years. You see Helsinki popping up quickly, but there was nothing to compete with it, and there were good resources put in over a period of time.
Ugand: Estonia is bringing the same sort of game on a government level, opening up residency and bringing everything online. It’s acting as a company itself, even if it’s the government. It’s fighting for citizens, in a sense. Every country has their own approach to what they do.
Bragiel: I think about this a lot because I’ve started things in other parts of the world. How do you optimize? How do you go out there and get that initial spark going? How do you inspire people? Like everything else in the world, though, it’s going exponentially faster.
Ugand: And the world is getting smaller. You can go anywhere quickly.
GamesBeat: Were there any other options you considered in Asia?
Bragiel: Sure. We had a lot of governments approaching us.
Ugand: We also had a lot of options in Europe, just like we were looking at places here. We had negotiations in many places.
Bragiel: You were talking about job creation. A lot of these countries say, “Hey, we want to go out there and get involved in something that’ll attract new growth. We want to create jobs. We want to create global products.” Gaming is a sexy industry right now. A lot of countries are approaching programs like us.
Ugand: It’s more or less 100 percent export. That’s always what they like. There were statistics released last year regarding the Nordics. One job in the game industry — and we’re only talking about making the game, not just in merchandising — created something like a quarter of a million in turnover. That’s not something you can find in many industries. It’s so quick to grow as well. It doesn’t need too many conditions fulfilled.
GamesBeat: There seem to be some things stopping this in the U.S. We had the Curt Schilling thing in Rhode Island with $75 million down the drain. There’s a concern about “corporate welfare.”
Bragiel: The United States is really against this. I don’t know why. People have this idea that Silicon Valley came out of nothing. Like I said, there were tons of research funded and guys splintered off from those projects. People don’t think of it that way. They just say, “Hey, this magically happened here, so why should we put any money into other regions?” It’s unfortunate that this doesn’t happen more in the United States. I would love to see that. Some places are slowly working up to it, but it’s more grassroots stuff. We’d like to see big money coming in.