The best Finnish games of 2018 has just been awarded

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Press release:
A total of eight awards were presented in the gala. The Finnish Game of the Year 2018, Best Mobile Game, and Best Computer and Console Game were chosen by the members of the Finnish Game Developers’ Association.

The Applied Game Award 2018 was selected by the Serious Gaming Cluster Finland Association. The Best Creative Achievement of the Year 2018 and the Comeback of the Year 2018 were chosen by the board of the Finnish Game Developers’ Association.

Also Power Player of the Year Award was presented and IGDA Finland presented their recognition to Christopher Hamilton with the Volunteer of the Year award for his work for the community in 2018.

The gaming magazine Pelit awarded the traditional “Kyöpeli” trophy to the People’s Choice Game of the Year 2018. The winner this year was Wreckfest by Bugbear.

The Finnish Game Awards was organized by the Finnish Game Developers’ Association and the Neogames Finland Association. The main sponsor of the Finnish Game Awards was Fingersoft.

Other sponsors were Rovio, Remedy Entertainment, Small Giant Games, Supercell, Colossal Order, Ubisoft RedLynx, Dodreams and Seriously Entertainment. The gala’s official after party was sponsored by Futureplay Games and Unity Technologies Finland.

The gala evening’s recorded video stream can be viewed at: https://www.neogames.com/fga-2019/.

The Finnish Game Awards 2019 winners are:

Applied Game Award 2018: Lights On! / Turku Game Lab & Humak
Finnish-Estonian Lights On! joint project has highlighted culturally significant historic tourist sites with the help of new technology.

The project has created a mobile application that allows you to experience the locations with the help of augmented reality. For more information visit http://lightson.humak.fi.

The Best Creative Achievement of the Year 2018: The Thief of Thieves / Rival Games The Walking Dead scriptwriter’s episode-based thieving simulator is a great visual experience in a cartoonish style. For more information visit https://rival-games.com/.

Comeback of the Year 2018: Wreckfest / Bugbear
Bugbear, a veteran developer of racing games, pushed themselves back into the limelight after many difficult years.

Officially launched in the summer of 2018, Wreckfest became a hit game after spending time as a Steam Early Access game since Christmas 2013. Wreckfest, published in cooperation with THQ Nordic, is a true success story. For more information visit http://bugbeargames.com/.

Power Player of the Year: Petri Hyökyranta / Rovio
GDPR was one of the major challenges for the gaming industry in 2018. The contribution of Petri Hyökyranta from Rovio was significant in preparing for it.

Petri was the primus motor in a large scale international preparatory project that did not allow the EU data protection regulation to catch the European gaming industry off guard.

Big Screen Game of the Year 2018: Tesla v. Lovecraft / 10tons
In early 2018, Crimsonland and Neon Chrome’s distinguished developer, 10tons, released a multi-platform arena shooter that features Nikola Tesla who has to stop H.P. Lovecraft and his monster army.

The game has received fantastic reviews on Steam Marketplace since its launch. For more information visit https://www.10tons.com/.

Mobile Game 2018 (Small Screen Game of the Year 2018): Brawl Stars / Supercell Brawl Stars from the Finnish gaming giant Supercell stayed in soft launch for more than 500 days, but was downloaded for more than 10 million times immediately after the official release.

Brawl Stars continues the series of successful Supercell games. For more information visit https://supercell.com.

Main Prize: The 2018 Finnish Game of the Year 2018: Brawl Stars / Supercell
Everyone knows Supercell and the newest game from the studio, Brawl Stars, was also the game of 2018 both in Finland and worldwide. For more information visit https://supercell.com.

3,200 employees in the Finnish Games Industry and 27% of them are from abroad According to information gathered by Neogames Finland ry, the Finnish gaming industry employs more than 3,000 gaming industry professionals for the first time. Of these, as many as 27 per

cent are foreigners. The total number of employees has increased by about 16 per cent in two years and the number of foreigners by as much as 75 per cent. Finnish gaming studios believe that more than 500 new jobs will be created in the next two years.

In 2018, only about 100 new games were released, compared with 150-200 previously released per year. This is mainly due to the fact that a large part of the games released are now longer-lasting services than traditional individual games.

Studios focus on developing existing games instead of publishing completely new games. Only five out of the 30 biggest game studios released a new game in 2018.

A comprehensive report on the gaming industry can be downloaded from the Neogames website at http://www.neogames.com/finnish-game-industry-report-2018/.

Jonas “O.J” Ek
The Gaming Ground
Twitter: @TheGamingGround