The 10 Weeks To Save The Games Industry campaign continues. Matchmade CEO Jiri Kupiainen and GamesForest.Club’s Maria Wagner are sustainably travelling around Europe spreading the message to games makers and communities that we all need to get serious about what we can all do to help save the planet.
The message is a simple one. Unless we all get smarter about the necessity and logistics of our business travel, the global turnaround in CO2 production that we’re all praying for simply isn’t going to happen.
The duo are now four weeks into their campaign and each week they’ll be reporting into PG.biz and sharing a new video on their YouTube. Here’s the latest episode (with a video below). Be sure to subscribe to their YouTube channel here to keep up with their journey.
Jiri Kupiaian: Another week, another episode. The Barcelona episode (below and on our YouTube), turned out to be a bit different than expected, because we somehow managed to not interview a single games company actually based in Barcelona. We ended up shooting so much content in London that we’ve been playing catchup with editing work ever since, and this unfortunately meant a lot of our interview outreach was done at the last minute. Luckily we’ve picked up the slack since, and still managed to get a couple of stellar interviews for the episode.
Our “Interrail trip” has included very little train travel for the past two weeks – the rail connections between Spain and Portugal are in terrible shape and the Portuguese railways were on a two week strike, so we took the bus to Lisbon and back. I’m writing this from Napoli, where we took the shortest route from Spain – a ferry via Sardinia. We’ll be back on rails tomorrow when we start heading back north with Zürich as the first stop. The Italian games industry has been elusive, and in the end we won’t be doing an episode here at all, but luckily we have a bunch of heavy hitting interviews from Lisbon for our next episode.
The reality of playing a travel influencer while running a company continues to hit both of us pretty hard – it’s easy to sink an endless amount of hours into planning, making reservations, requesting and coordinating interviews, etc. – not to even mention editing, editing and editing. At least we now have a pretty solid feel for how many hours of editing each episode will take and can plan around it. The next challenge on this front is simply what to do with all these files – we’ve filled up 3 terabytes of hard disks with raw footage and project files, and most bed & breakfasts don’t exactly have gigabit fiber installed.
In the end the life of a travel creator seems to be much like the life of a game developer – you don’t really play that many games when you build them for a living, and indeed most of our off-camera travel simply consists of grabbing dinner in the evening and walking around a bit on Saturday. But I’m not complaining – it’s a massive privilege to be able to do something like this. And in the end, we’re in Napoli, and pizza is the one big true love of my life.
To catch all the episodes so far head to their YouTube here and find out more about their journey so far here: Intro, Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, Week 4.
