Finland has been a major contributor to amazing gaming experiences thanks to its homegrown studios such as Supercell, Angry Birds creators Rovio Entertainment, and the developers of the Max Payne franchise, Remedy Entertainment, to name a few. Another ambitious company on the same path is Metaplay, which isn’t a developer or publisher but contributes to the gaming world with a ready-made backend platform designed specifically for games. Interested to know more about them, our team at GamingonPhone sat with Teemu Haila, the Chief Product Officer (CPO) at Metaplay for an exciting interview where they discussed the Finnish Gaming Industry, local talent, future trends, and more, which we would delve here.
1. Hello Teemu, let us start with your introduction and role at Metaplay.
Absolutely, and thanks for having me. I’m Teemu Haila, the Chief Product Officer here at Metaplay and one of the founders. I’ve been involved in games for around 16 years, but who’s counting? I’m a game developer, so I work on art, sound, and I love making games. What I usually gravitate towards, though, is the stuff you need to do but not everyone on a team wants to do, often the product management side or technology.
My previous game studio, PlayRaven, was acquired by Rovio. We were based here in Helsinki, Finland, and the journey of Metaplay starts from that experience, which directly relates to what’s happening in the Finnish gaming industry now. We were talking with the other studios around us because Finland is a very open ecosystem. We ended up sharing a lot of stories with other studios, and it reaffirmed that this is not just a problem that we feel exists, but maybe it’s a shared, valuable problem to solve for other contemporaries at this moment in time.
It gave us the confidence to find a company dedicated to solving this technology problem of making free-to-play games, taking the leap of faith, finding the first pile of customers, and so on. The community was a big part of us not just being here in games but also having the courage to found a company in games and explore the business there. That spirit of cooperation is very much in my background of why I’m in games.
2. What historical factors contributed to Finland becoming a hub for mobile game development as we know it today?
That’s a very large question, and we’ve been trying to figure that out for a while now. The best I can distill it down is maybe three things, and I’m sure there are others with more nuanced opinions. First of all, Nokia was such a big deal, not just ahead of its time in making mobile phones and that technology popular, but it was also a massive part of the Finnish economy.
Nokia was such a big deal, not just ahead of its time in making mobile phones and that technology popular, but it was also a massive part of the Finnish economy
It was a main driver of universities and education. Nokia pulled a huge amount of people into thinking in terms of mobile computing and the ability to build a whole ecosystem out of just funding that research and all the thousands of companies in Finland who were contributing towards building Nokia devices, all the software, and so on, including games. Nokia founded a huge amount of Finnish games. It unshackled the Finnish industry, looking at what was the iPhone at the time, and that’s sort of the genesis point of a lot of the successful companies we know today from Finland.
If Nokia is that one business and ecosystem-level thing, then there are these more silent and cultural things that are more long-running. First is the demo scene, this very niche thing that happened to be strong in Finland, which was about artistic coders trying to push the boundaries of what you can do with a computer in the same way you do with a game. You have to be very good at extracting performance from a computer and making something artistically meaningful.
The demo scene by itself doesn’t relate to games completely, but the same people who were very influential in games today were inspired by it. It was focused on the art of making things instead of the business of making things, and this historically built on top of a lot of hobby-based interaction with technology and computers in general software.
Then the third pillar, I think, is the Finnish design aesthetic, which is about our national identity. I would call it ‘arrogant design,’ which means it’s very minimalistic, very confident that this is a meaningful small artifact and you’re going to like it, instead of being something very extravagant like Russia, our neighbor is more historically about the opulence, so we were the opposite of that.
I think that design aesthetic, when applied to user interfaces, systems, games, and economies, happens to be a winning strategy when you’re making casual games that need to be immediate, simple enough to play quickly, but then fundamentally have a lot of quality and deep thought behind it. So these three things are what I would attribute as unique about Finland.
3. You touched upon the universities and education while discussing Nokia, we are curious to know has the education system in Finland influenced the growth of mobile game studios?
That’s a really good question, and funny enough, my final thesis was exactly about your question. Let me tell you about my Master’s thesis from long ago. We’ve had a long collaboration between people who are passionate about developing game studies in universities and the game studios. These people are friends with each other, and we hang out at industry events now and then. That’s been the case for tens of years.
From that sort of action, both from an educational point of view to develop Finnish education and specifically service the games industry, a few individuals have put their blood, sweat, and tears into pushing that agenda, I respect them a lot. They have managed to set up a pipeline that starts from kindergarten, where you have evening hobby clubs for people who show interest in toying with computers. They have something that relates to gaming or game development available as a hobby in a couple of cities, all the way from there into mapping the other growth steps.
When you join a lower elementary school, the system is structured so that you have relevant skills available to you, and if you’re passionate, you can see this as a potential career. It goes all the way to universities, where students try to learn the actual skills that studios need. It’s been a long time coming and quite a painful process, but I’m happy to say that nowadays we do have a pipeline for producing good enough student material that companies can then train to be useful by the end.
But to your specific question about the role, it’s still a fact and has always been a fact, that it’s easier to hire people into Finnish game companies from Brazil than it is from Finland. It is a long-running joke, but it is also true. We have had a big Brazilian population in the Finnish industry since we are a small country, we are a very ‘import heavy’ industry. Then the other half of your question, that we talk about a lot, it’s education and people immigrating to Finland. Those are the only two available ways for us to grow the industry over time, and both are hard.
4. What role do government policies and support play in nurturing the mobile gaming industry in Finland?
Luckily, we have a fairly easy time with our government. The only things they do that directly affect a startup wanting to do mobile games are through grants and funding, which is their directing power. They have grants for certain things but not for others.
So at the end of the day, it’s been easier to do the things that they have grants for. A fun fact is that we have a government instance called Business Finland, responsible for helping new businesses form, channeling grants, and so on. Historically, Business Finland has not had any grants for games, so it was not allowed to get grants to help you find a studio or any other support. However, they had grants to support companies investing in technology.
It’s a well-known fact that the Finnish government has funded a huge amount of game engines, and then game studios had to make a game on top of their engine as a demonstration piece to qualify for government funding. This made us relatively technology-heavy as a country because that’s what we had.
Since then, we’ve had an on-again, off-again relationship with the Finnish government, as they get a huge amount of tax revenue specifically from mobile games because they are vastly scalable good businesses, and everybody appreciates that. At the same time, from a government point of view, they have a real problem with investing in speculative art projects that might become billion-dollar hits or might be nothing. That’s a really hard policy decision to make.
So it kind of ends up being, ‘If it’s about making a game, I don’t know if we can really help with that.’ It’s an ongoing discussion. But to your direct question about policies, luckily enough, at this point in time, we don’t have major issues, even on an EU level. We’ve got discussions about what kind of gatchas are allowed or not, or how GDPR affects your analytics as a studio, but those aren’t defining factors that make or break businesses.
(speaking about the Digital Markets Act regulations) The DMA, for anybody who might not be fully aware, really focuses on breaking the monopoly of the big stores. When discussing policies that affect developers, I would argue that the most meaningful and shackling policies for a new studio in Finland are not government policies but platform policies. These platform policies are not designed purely for the developers’ benefit but for the platforms’ benefit a lot of the time.
What the DMA and the EU are trying to do is break that essentially monopolistic, toxic market control and make it possible for more varied stores and distribution channels to exist. I know for a fact, just from discussions here in Finland, that many people would love to make more types of games than what exists today but find it financially unfeasible because of how the platforms work.
I’m really hopeful that if we can open up the platforms, we’ll end up with a more diverse ecosystem of more interesting games and smaller game companies potentially being successful. But, of course, it’s a future nobody can fully predict.
(On the idea of having multiple stores, following Epic Games Store release on mobile) I agree that Epic is a really interesting player, especially since they’ve already demonstrated their ability to enter the PC store market with the Epic Store. Something similar could happen in the mobile space. I would also propose that another meaningful form of competition could come from the open-source or indie community.
There are already movements to establish more open-source, community-led stores, which would be comparable to itch.io in games. These platforms are niche but important because the content available there is generally different from what’s available on Steam. They cater to different audiences, and both can exist in parallel. I would hope for a world where we have multiple winners instead of a single dominant player, even in new game-specific stores.
5. How has the success of companies like Supercell and Rovio inspired the growth of other mobile game studios in Finland?
I think I can accurately say that, for example, my previous games company, Play Raven, would not exist or would not have existed without Supercell’s contribution. This is a very concrete thing to say. When Supercell became successful, due to their handling of PR and other aspects, they became the ‘good guys’ in the industry.
They helped others by sharing their network and making connections that might not otherwise have been possible. Specifically, I’m talking about connections with Apple, Google, and venture capital funding. Suddenly, you could talk to these people when they previously might not have been interested, and Finland is now on the map because of them (Supercell and Rovio).
Play Raven was able to find investors who believed in our vision back in the day, and we were able to network with high-level Apple people to understand how the platforms work and how we should adapt our products or games to make sense for Apple. All of Play Raven’s games were games of the week or featured in the main banners or something. I want to say that’s because of that interaction we were able to have to understand what they wanted to sell.
So it’s a beneficial loop of how they influence other things. What you could say maybe happens is that there’s a very, very heavy competition for employees because, of course, say, Supercell or Netflix nowadays and the other big players, especially Netflix. One of their public policies is to pay the highest salaries. So they will attract a certain type of developer who values salary over other values, maybe. We do have stiff competition for the most talented developers, which can actually squeeze out smaller companies.
It can make it very expensive to employ people or mean that studios have to be more clever about why they are a good place to work or what they do is deeply meaningful and worth doing even with a lower salary or whatever, but I feel like that even ends up being a positive force in general for the Finnish ecosystem but it is a good place to work in because there’s the talent competition.
For example, we don’t have unions like you have in the USA or the UK. We don’t need a protective body in the same way that many other industries do because the people are the most valuable resource and there’s such heavy competition for them. So that’s another direct effect of having a few very successful studios in a small country.
6. In what ways has the local talent pool in Finland contributed to the success of its mobile game studios?
Let me tell it from a story format of how I see this working out in practice. First of all, I think of Supercell’s CEO, Ilkka Paananen, who had a fairly public talk where he discussed the Supercell dream of having independent teams and letting those teams execute on their own. His speech included the specific quote, “The best people don’t always make the best teams.” I think that’s a really important point. Even if you hire the ‘best people’ and provide good benefits or compensation, it doesn’t mean you’ll end up with a high-performing team.
Even if you hire the ‘best people’ and provide good benefits or compensation, it doesn’t mean you’ll end up with a high-performing team.
This is a really interesting factor that makes it possible for startups to compete because a startup, by definition, ideally has a high-performing team. The ultimate team might be five people, and those five people could be outputting a hundred times their size because they do the right thing without any of the bureaucracy that comes with having large teams.
There’s always this interest in, I’ve seen, as a sort of circle loop almost in the community where you have people working in these bigger studios, hopefully enjoying their time and getting frustrated by the speed of work or getting bored after seven years of working on something specific. Maybe they have an idea of something new, and they’re well off enough financially, so they’re able to lower their salaries if they have a passion they want to follow.
Then, combined with this idea of “hey, we’re now in the age of literal AI and maybe new platform rules changing, maybe those are opportunities that we could, if we were a small, clever team, do something that wasn’t possible two years ago.” That’s how, from the bigger studios, you still end up getting these small, high-functioning startup teams that are on a mission to hopefully make something great.
So, I feel in the industry, we have a lot of value in the bigger companies of having these teams that can work together towards a goal every single day and steadily output bug-free code, good game balance, new content, and so on.
At the same time, we want to have these weird and wonderful small startups just experimenting and doing crazy stuff that might become good some other day. You might be jumping from one mode of working to another over your career multiple times as you may get bored or inspired. That’s kind of what I feel the dynamic is and the reason why it works over time, so not everybody just gravitates to one place and stays there.
7. How have international investments and partnerships influenced the growth of Finland’s mobile game studios?
So first of all, it’s been super important. Obviously, building a competitive, high-quality game in a hit-driven industry is always going to be very capital-intensive because you have to outdo so many already established, massively successful games. You need a lot of capital, and Finland historically is not a rich country. We don’t have generational wealth, so that means outside capital is usually a complete must-have. There’s no other way to build something that costs five million, for example.
I feel the Renaissance of the current mobile industry did start with Rovio and Roberts becoming successful and leading the way, followed by other studios. They were able to sort of do the Silicon Valley thing, where now people here generally know how to pitch for funding, which is crucial. There are a lot of examples, and you can learn it, but it’s an achievable skill.
That, combined with a lot of investors noticing that it’s maybe worth investing in Finland, means there’s a lot of access to capital and knowledge on how to pitch for them. I feel it’s the same trend that we’ve seen in other countries where the iPhone is always being heard as spearheading the mobile market, leading to this massive boom cycle where it felt anything was possible. From an investment point of view, the market grew so rapidly that you could almost invest in anything and feel you were making your investment back fairly safely.
It went into the UA crash when Apple did the IDFA change, followed by GDPR and everything else happening at the same time. This significantly killed off the user acquisition scalability strategy that existed. It took a few years for that change to propagate into investments, but you can draw a fairly straight line through those events to investors globally losing confidence that a fresh game could grow in the market in any organic sense.
It vastly shifted towards the idea that you need to have a very high-performing game, and only after it’s already kind of successful do you pour all your capital into that one game, hundreds of millions, to grow it. From that dynamic, it killed off most investment in Finland for a long time. This was then compounded by Russia’s attack on Ukraine, which spooked the markets and caused inflation or accelerated inflation that was already made tentative by COVID-19.
All of that led to rising interest rates, which just means that investors are even more careful with their capital. So now you have all these macro trends piling on top of each other, all basically saying, “Maybe you should not invest in games all that much” That’s what all those trends are kind of saying to you in parallel.
That led to this valley of death, I want to say, in the Finnish games market. Funded per year, there are the outliers that get funded no matter what because maybe it’s their fourth company, they’re well-known, or they’re already rich. But new companies have no chance. This has been a disruptive force. We’ve had a very sharp drop in the number of companies getting new funding, and it’s almost impossible at the moment to get second-round funding. So, if you did get funding five years ago, you’re in trouble now unless you have a hit game.
If you have a hit game, you don’t need funding. It’s a very difficult position to be in, and there have been several companies that have gone bankrupt because they couldn’t secure the second round. However, some companies managed to downsize their workforce and lower costs to figure it out. It hasn’t been a very happy few years for those in such positions. But my feeling is that this is just a temporary swing, and we’re starting to see the other side of that slope. New companies are coming in, and these are just the macro trends.
But this is a very long way of answering that access to capital and the capital market has a huge effect on how companies form. We’re still, I think, seeing the first wave up and down and maybe up again. Ask me again in 10 years, and maybe we’ll see if it followed the pattern or not.
8. What future trends do you foresee for Finland’s mobile gaming industry, and how will it continue to evolve?
Forecasting is hard, especially forecasting the future. What I’m confident about, but think is inevitable, is the megatrend of games as a service being an absolute winner across all distribution channels. This has already been fairly true in mobile games. It’s interesting now with the new platforms coming up and the stores opening. The live service game makes the most economic sense, fitting a high-quality developer’s quality of life with good salaries, working conditions, and no crunch. It’s also massively appealing to the mass audience as free games.
What I’m confident about, but think is inevitable, is the megatrend of games as a service being an absolute winner across all distribution channels.
With all of that, players can only play a few service games at a time, so there’s going to be very high competition to be one of those games. To achieve that, you essentially have to have amazing relevancy in your game. The game needs to be relevant to you as a human, which usually translates down to amazing live updates, amazing branding, and amazing community building; those things are very time-consuming and happen over time.
Thus, the trend has been and will continue to be that all successful games will be super predominantly live-operated, the same way Fortnite is. Supercell and others are spearheading this, and those teams that manage live operations will continue growing because the games make so much money. What makes that possible are very good product management, project management skills, and tools.
(On being asked about Metaplay’s role in the growth) Well, we make tools *laughs* Our (Metaplay) vision is to build the stuff that does not exist yet, which will make it possible to grow teams of five to ten people into teams of hundreds or thousands of people operating a live game.
This is a very difficult transformation, and we are focused on the tooling and technology side to make that possible. That’s not just the mobile market, this trend will be more strongly felt with cross-platform games and even with console, dedicated platform games. They will all turn out to be live services at some point and mobile is the one spearheading it, which is why Metaplay is currently mostly focused on mobile games first. We will expand to other platforms and cross-platforms as the industry finds more patterns and best practices worth turning into a product.
(on game discovery) What I think is a little more speculative but super interesting involves the DMA and the platforms opening through EU regulations, hopefully propagating to the rest of the world. I would really hope that when I say live service games, the one thing I hate about the industry today is specifically how discovery does not work on any platform.
The only way to find a game today is to see an ad or have somebody tell you about it; a friend or an ad, and then you deep link into a place to download it. There are zero functional resources for a casual person to just find a game. This problem needs to change, and it has to be solved by somebody somewhere. I hope that with these new platforms and stores, we can find better ways to discover games, similar to how Steam was a much better way to discover games than going to GameStop.
I’m hoping, for example, that Epic brings in their knowledge on how to get people excited to search for new content. If I continue on this thread, I hope this leads to more financially viable genres of games. Because of the discovery problem today, you have to make a game that can profitably show performance ads.
That is the lynchpin of whether you can be successful. It means you can get creative with your themes, which is fantastic, and find something that resonates more, leading to cheaper ads. But fundamentally, your game has to make more money than your neighbor’s. It doesn’t have to be a better game, just more profitable so that you’re able to show ads and people will find your game. I hope that there will be more ways to create “good games” that can be slightly less profitable because there will be other ways for you to be discovered rather than just thinking “can I out beat my neighbour on an ad?“
If that happens, not only would we have a much richer ecosystem in terms of games, which I would love, but it would also mean that smaller teams could aim for slightly less successful games, establishing more interesting businesses that are maybe less swayed by the big players doing UA tricks on the channels or slightly less dependent on who Apple is featuring today or Google. That’s the world where I want to live, but I’m not sure how we’ll get there.
9. Can you share any success stories or notable projects that have emerged from MetaPlay’s initiatives in the mobile gaming sector?
As much as I love to take credit for some of the games built on top of Metaplay *laughs*, I can’t. What I can say is that there are multiple stories of us working with studios to expand Metaplay’s capabilities, ensuring they can build something that makes their project possible. We’re then able to put that technology into a product and make it available to other developers who think it is a good idea, adjusting their plans. It becomes a best practice, and we can put some of the silent knowledge of our customers into a new best practice that maybe didn’t exist before.
One of them, which is relatively new to me, is this idea spearheaded by Rovio as the first one that I’ve heard of in Finland and probably by Supercell. They might contest me on this split of how specifically you do live ops in a game in an effective way. The common wisdom said that you have developers who make new features, and then you have developers who do upkeep on the game, and then that got distilled down into more of a best practice of having a sort of live team.
I’ll talk about game designers to keep this simple. You have a game designer who makes new features, and that person does not have the permission internally to modify the game’s economy. Because if you change the economy, you might screw the whole game by making things cheap or making progression too hard. So, you have two very distinct people who do not necessarily even talk to each other all that often. Then, historically, that economy designer has been a huge part of live updates.
But now, the new thing is that, say, the way Rovio uses Beacon, their internal tool, which is really cool. They have a third designer now who is only about live ops and scheduling live ops, and that person, again, has no direct permission to edit the game’s economy directly.
So, we sort of moved from two departments into having a third one and establishing a completely new workflow where you have one group of people working on new features, another group safeguarding the game system as a whole, and then the third category of people working on the live content that utilizes the features but produces the maximum amount of fun by having events run at the right time with the right rewards and the right kind of challenge.
To make this possible in terms of Metaplay, I’m personally working on a visual overview of the game’s entire calendar across years, covering all the things you’ve run in the game and are planning to run in the future, to see how they fit together in parallel with game updates, in-game events, A/B tests, client updates, and so on.
This allows you to think of the game as a massive timeline, to adjust those small things, add content to places that feel empty, and make this in a way that can be done by a non-technical person; a designer who doesn’t code, doesn’t like opening Unity, or doesn’t work in the deep depths of the economy Excel files, but is amazing at seeing a calendar and visualizing fun by scheduling in the game.
So, it’s about having a tool like this. First of all, it wasn’t invented by us, but I want to make the best possible implementation anyone has ever seen of this concept. More importantly, it enables a new type of individual to contribute to the game. If the requirement is deep economy Excel knowledge or coding, then maybe these people can’t be part of your team. We’re being more inclusive to the workforce. Sorry, that’s a very narrative individual detail, though I’m excited about this up-and-coming tool.
There are similar examples where we talk about the live operations of many games, where there’s a huge amount of life hacks around the studios that we keep integrating into our SDK. I find that motivating because it’s not just about making features; it’s about thinking, “how do we do games and what meaningful change can we make? What can we do better?” AI is going to be a big one. I was just talking before this call about how to utilize that effectively in what we do and, by extension, what our customers do.
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