! Please dont look at this article as an official position of the Estonian community, this is a private commentary from the GameDev Estonia CEO – Andrejs Rusinovskis
This year’s Gamescom was my third adventure to Cologne. The first time I came to this grand event was in 2022 with the help of the Baltic Explorers program, and I was extremely happy that they were able to take me with their program funding, even though GameDev Estonia at that moment was still a very young association. I got there because Tartu Teaduspark represented Estonia in the Baltic Explorers project. So I was able to get to Gamescom mainly thanks to the help of Henri Hanson, who was leading the trade mission from the Estonian side. Henri was able to bring with him several Estonian studios too, like Joyxir (hyper casual mobile games), Placeholder Gameworks (Broken Alliance), Maru VR Productions (Bootstrap Island), and Not Bad Games (with a mobile game called Freddyssey). At the same time, we had access to a long-running EAS project that IGDA Estonia was in charge of. So even more studios were present, around six in total.
It was a very complicated event for me. For the first day, I was totally lost. I didn’t prepare well. I would even say I had no idea how to prepare well, and the industry was for me quite new because I was coming from a totally different place—mostly social work and video game preservation—so I made quite a lot of mistakes, or I would say I didn’t use a lot of opportunities. At least I managed to get some new contacts, and several of those contacts are still helping me to this day, so my first year at Gamescom was hit and miss. I was happy I was there, but I would say the value of my existence there for Estonian gamedev was quite low. I want to notice that at that gamescom I’ve got several important contacts from the previous head of IGDA, Mariana Rannik, who helped me to make first steps and learn valuable insights into the industry.
For the second time, I already didn’t have any possible help from international projects or any sponsorship opportunity to bring me to Gamescom. I initially believed I wouldn’t be able to travel there, but at the last minute Creative Europe approved me to their booth. If I remember correctly, this was the first time that Creative Europe had their own space at Gamescom, and of course I happily used that opportunity. I had to pay for the accommodation and, if I remember correctly, for the flight, but at least they had the space in B2B. And as a representative of a country, for me it was important to have a physical place. That year several other Estonian studios managed to get to Gamescom with different projects or with their own money, and that year I already had some prep time; I knew where I needed to go and who I needed to meet. I finally started working more with our Finnish friends, the Swedish Association. It was the first time when I was at the meeting of all of the heads of the countries and understood the value of the European video game Federation, so my second year at Gamescom was quite valuable.
Even though it was great to be at Gamescom, I always felt that my opportunities there are quite low because I have barely anything to propose. The Estonian gamedev scene is friendly and great, and I love our community, but we really don’t have many projects, or money, in it. And of course, at such big conferences as Gamescom, GDC, or any other big name, you have to make your country “interesting.” You have to promote your community to the investors, to potential partners, or even for marketing agencies; they have to see any kind of value for them in your country, and for those first two years, well, I had barely anything to showcase. Yes, we have several success stories, but they are very small if you compare them to our neighbors like Sweden, Finland, or even Lithuania. And of course we have great developers… but that’s not much. I can always tell about the quality of our education, and it is really great, but it will not interest big fish… or even any kind of fish. So from those two years of Gamescom I fully understood that without a bit of help from outside, some kind of additional push, I will continue coming to this event in the same starting position – there is basically nothing I can do by myself, or even with the help of our community, to make us look interesting on the international market.
So why am I writing all of that? Well, it’s to compare those years to this year. From the side of a local videogame developer or even an outside passerby, nothing special or crazy happened this year. Yes, we were part of the Nordic Superstars Booth with Finland and Norway, and yes, we had the delegation of ten studios. But it’s not like we made something crazy or that we were the center of attention… So as usual, there will be several posts on LinkedIn about our adventure and how happy we are. There will be several comments from people that met us, and they will say, Yay, we have great potential, and voila, in the end, we go to the next event. But no, really, this time it’s much more; it’s much more than just that constant business circle.
This is the first time someone outside of GameDev Estonia and our community cared about us. We had Kadi Haljand from Enterprise Estonia (who basically created this trade mission), we had Siim Leedmaa from invest Estonia, we had Mats Kuuskemaa from e-residency program. Even Deputy Secretary General for Economy and Innovation of Estonian government Sandra Särav came to check what is this weird thing that we call game development. Before this trade mission there was barely any communication with any official entities in in Estonia. The first real cooperation came this year with our adventure to GDC. This time people outside of local community, outside of our Discord server, came to the Gamescom. They saw our world, and they saw what we’re doing, and I hope that they saw that we as Estonia have potential in this market. Even though we are small, and the money flow is relatively low compared to almost any of our neighbors, we have a level of quality to our projects. Games that we produce are mostly very well received (even if they don’t sell as well as we would like). I have no idea how this happened, but this year we have more releases than any year before. I counted at least 14 games. Yes, most of them are small indie projects, but still, 14 games. If we look at the previous years, it was like six to eight games per year, and most of them were low-budget releases. This year we at least have several success stories with Buckshot Roulette, Rusty’s retirement, or in the VR space Bootstrap Island is a great example of a quality game. Yes, those are not multimillion-dollar projects, but they’re competently made, they have a great marketing campaign, and they have a target audience that is willing to play and pay for those games.
We had different meetings, and mostly I was not alone. I was with Sandra Sarav or Kadi Kaljand from creative Industries, and we met with leaders of French, Polish, Belgian, South Korean GameDev and most of our meetings went very well. Those countries are interested to work with us, they are interested in Nordic market, in the quality that we can give to their projects through codevelopment, and they were interested in our artistic way of doing things. Almost all of the projects that we have at the moment in Estonia were made not with the intention of the highest possible earnings, but to showcase the artpiece of the studio. A lot of developers that I talk with just want to showcase their vision of their “artpiece” and they’re interested in that much more than in the monetary outcome. Its usually pretty bad for the business, but at least our developers create something unique, something that they will be proud of. I can be sure that our community will not try to scam people with some fancy words.
So for this Gamescom we really had time and a great team to prepare our trade mission. We printed a crazy amount of different printed materials. We made an advertisement video. We were very active at the booth. We all had crazy amounts of meetings. We went all together to the Nordic Party, and a big part of our studios went to the Polish Party. I managed to get to the most important bureaucratic-level meetings. We had a presentation on the main stage of the Congress; even for the first time, we tried to have our own event, and it went quite okay.
And with all those activities the government representatives were there with us – they saw what we’re doing, who we are, what is the market, who are our potential partners, where we need help the most. The good part is – they all were pretty interested, and even had some fun. So maybe this will finally give us a small push to have a bit more support on the government level. And that is important not only because of the basic question of money. it’s more about the representation. When ministry of culture will plan their next years budget, or any kind of project – they will remember that there is not only music industry, film industry, designers association, but there is video game development association too, and that video game development is not a Casino! And there are artists in that industry, and even writers, voice actors, and maaaybe they will put us into that budget. Even if it will be minimum amount of support, we will be at least there – and that for me will be a really big win. Will it happen? I cannot be certain. But at least now I see the potential of that happening. I can see the potential of future projects with Invest Estonia, or Enterprises Estonia, or any other Estonia. Can be a space agency of Estonia, why not.
Those are all of my thoughts on this year’s Gamescom… and just some things that I wanted to share for a long time but never had time due to my crazy schedule. But if you want to learn more, you can always ask me on Discord. I will be happy to share the information I know, I can tell that at the moment its hard to talk about any of the future plans. Let’s see the outcomes of this Gamescom. I think in the month or two it will be already easy to predict what will happen next: are we growing, are we still stagnating, and do we have money to do some bigger scale events? Only time will show.
Here are some pictures:
