Pocket Gamer Connects Helsinki is gearing up to be our biggest event in the city yet, and we couldn’t be more excited to share with you all that we have in store! It’s going to be a magnificent two day event packed with endless opportunities to learn, scale and most importantly, connect.
If you haven’t heard, we’re bringing back Europe’s favourite games industry conference to the spiritual home of mobile gaming for the first time in two years. On September 27th to 28th, over 1,200 games industry professionals from around the globe will descend upon Helsinki for two days full of networking, matchmaking opportunities and hours of wisdom from over 200 thought leaders from all over the world.
We’re continuing our series spotlighting just some of the amazing speakers that will be gracing the stage at our Helsinki show this September. They have been generous enough to share a few of their insights and expertise with us ahead of time, and you won’t want to miss them!
Developers need to place more effort into building out Live Ops, events and social features much more earlier in the product’s lifecycle.
Joakim Achrén
Today, we’re shining the spotlight on the Founder of Elite Game Developers, Joakim Achrén. Joakim is an entrepreneur, with close to twenty years of experience from two venture-backed gaming startups, including Next Games, makers of The Walking Dead: No Man’s Land, The Walking Dead: Our World and Stranger Things: Puzzle Tales. Next Games IPOed in Helsinki Nasdaq First North stock exchange in 2017, and was recently acquired by Netflix in 2022. Joakim is now running Elite Game Developers, a company that helps entrepreneurs in starting their first games company. He’s also an angel investor in Talewind, Funcraft, Superbloom, Lightheart Entertainment, and over twenty other games companies. Since early 2021, Joakim has been a Venture Partner with Play Ventures, which is an early-stage fund focusing on the games industry. Joakim is based in Helsinki and writes on Twitter under @joakim_a and you can go here to connect with Joakim on LinkedIn.
Don’t miss Joakim Achrén at Pocket Gamer Connects Helsinki, where he will be participating in a panel about the gaming ecosystem in Finland, and how it’s developing.
PocketGamer.biz: What’s the most common mistake you see being made in the games sector?
Joakim Achrén: I think the games industry has gotten used to launching MVPs, and not understanding that scaling an MVP to a big game isn’t anywhere near as easy as doing the MVP in the first place. To quote Marshall Goldsmith: ”What got you here won’t get you there.” The studios should be ramping up to a minimum of 25 people quite quickly after launching a game. You don’t want to let your early player cohorts to suffer from a shallow game and still keep them coming back for months, when the game has nothing for them to do. The future winners on mobile will be the ones who double down on live ops and the content treadmill, to keep all their player cohorts, old and new, playing.
As the struggle to find profitable user acquisition continues on mobile, I believe that developers will end up branching to PC and console.
Joakim Achrén
What is the single biggest challenge facing the mobile games industry today?
At the same time as privacy changes have increased UA costs on traditional channels, the quality bar has increased for casual and midcore titles. Developers need to place more effort into building out Live Ops, events and social features much more earlier in the product’s lifecycle. The developers who are launching more comprehensive games, with live ops, have a chance at retaining their elder cohorts right from launch. This will help them to stack DAU and generate revenue from the most early cohorts for much longer, basically keeping them playing from months to years.
What developments do you think have been undervalued by the mobile games industry?
I think that crossplatform gaming is still undervalued. Developers spend lots of time focusing on their mobile release, which seems limiting, especially when so many gaming genres are already crossplatform. As the struggle to find profitable user acquisition continues on mobile, I believe that developers will end up branching to PC and console, which will give them a reach beyond mobile.
When you work with mentors or advisors, when you receive feedback, it’s paramount that you take action on this feedback.
Joakim Achrén
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received that you can pass on to others?
When you work with mentors or advisors, when you receive feedback, it’s paramount that you take action on this feedback. That’s been a crucial way for me to improve in my career; when ever I’ve received feedback, I’ve tried to incorporate the feedback into what I’m doing on a day-to-day basis. Usually the result of listening and acting based on feedback has been immensely helpful in doing better at what I’m doing. So my advice is: seek out feedback and take action. You will learn a lot and take your self further much quicker.
Connect with our stellar speakers
Expand your network with the likes of Joakim Achrén and many, many more brilliant minds at this year’s Pocket Gamer Connects Helsinki conference. There is no better place to connect with the biggest and most inspiring industry players and take your business to the next level. Head over to our website and book your ticket today, we have both in-person and virtual attendee tickets available, and the clock is ticking!
