Take a moment to clear your mind and imagine the following…
Imagine a games accelerator that focuses on helping teams with new free-to-play games by bringing veteran mentors from top global free-to-play companies to guide them.
Imagine it as a campus, where teams can spend two months together focusing on their projects.
Imagine all expenses are covered.
Imagine it takes place in a beautiful city with sunshine, nature and formidable cuisine.
It all sounds impossible… borderline ridiculous.
But guess what? It’s REAL and has been running for four years already!
Check it out at http://www.f2pcampus.com
But where?
In the charming, quaint city of Vitoria-Gasteiz, the perfect setting for a secret escape to focus on projects and still have pockets to explore and get lost in when you need downtime.
The regional government has been promoting the videogame industry for the last 5 years, aiming to create a sustainable ecosystem. So there is no better place.
We secured the amazing EUNEIZ university for the campus to take place. They set up a perfectly prepared 24 hour office-like work area for the participants.
The Mentors
We have been incredibly lucky with the lineup of mentors that have agreed to come to the campus. Some spend a whole week with the teams, helping them in different aspects such as game design, monetisation or analytics. Others attend for a couple of days, spending a little time with the teams and offering a masterclass open to the whole gaming community followed by a networking event.
The following mentors joined the program last year and we expect all of them to come back this year:
Success stories
We were impressed by the quality and dedication of the teams that joined the program in previous editions.
Boom Corp is a Tampere-based mobile games company founded in 2020 in Finland. During the program, they improved their game Boom Slingers, an online multiplayer turn-based title with a combat system inspired by Worms artillery and card games. To date, the game has more than one million downloads.
Etorki Games is a studio from the city of Irun in the Basque Country, who were working on the mobile horror game Evil Nun, which has already reached more than one million downloads since its release right at the start of the campus. They used all the help from the mentors to make the most revenue out of this popularity. Now they are developing the PC version of the game.
Garage 51 is a games startup from Barcelona, developers of Demon Blade, a beautiful combat game set in a mythological Japanese universe. Their participation in the campus let them get experts’ feedback on how to tweak the game and how to launch it onto the market in the most effective way. Today the game has more than one million downloads and they are working on their next title.
History and team behind the F2P Campus
The F2P Campus acceleration program was born in 2018. It was designed and founded by Jon Beltran and Raul Herrero, two veteran developers with more than 20 years in the videogame industry willing to share their knowledge and experience with talented young developers.
Knowing there were too many generic games accelerator programs out there, they decided to focus on the business model that is overwhelmingly dominant on mobile and gaining ground on other platforms, free-to-play games. This is where the biggest chunk of the revenue is these days, and it’s a notoriously difficult business model to pull off. They realised the industry could probably use a specific program designed around free-to-play. We assist the teams with all aspects of game creation, production and marketing.
In 2022 Oscar Sahun joined the program management team. He has 12 years of experience in the videogame industry: he worked in different studios as a game designer and 3D artist, he co-founded an indie studio called Blowing Minds and for the last five years he has been managing the incubation program for videogame studios GameBCN.
