3 min read

EGD News #22

It’s Joakim here. Greetings from Helsinki. Second week in lockdown and I’m constantly on Zoom.

I’m going to be attending PGC Digital and I’m moderating a panel on “Creating the right company culture”. If you’re planning on attending this online event, please check out our panel. You can find more info from here.

Let’s get into the news.

Blog

Games startup funding during a pandemic — I’ve been reached out by loads of founders who want to know what is happening to raise money for a gaming startup. In this article, I’m giving my perspective on how VCs work and how your fundraising process might have changed.

I expect this to be the reality for the next three months. Please share this out there to people who might need to read this. You can read the article here.

View all the previous articles on the blog by going here.

Podcast

Having Confidence to Invest in Gaming — Paul Murphy was the co-founder and CEO of Dots, the creators of Two Dots. Paul left Dots and started his career in VC in 2018 with Northzone VC, based out of London, UK. I wanted to ask Paul about his confidence in investing in games. We talk about the rise of mobile gaming and what it meant six years ago for VC and what is the situation now.

Paul looks for deals that can yield outstanding outcomes, where everything comes together. That’s why he invested in MMO developer Klang Games in Berlin. We also talk about his ways of learning to become a better VC. Paul shares loads of advice here, especially for founders who are looking at doing something different.

All past episodes are here.

Our Youtube channel is live

We finally have a Youtube channel. I’m going to start posting lectures and other video content there. I’m thinking about doing pitching sessions there, where entrepreneurs can pitch their company to me, and I can then give feedback on how they communicate their idea and what kind of discussions might come up in meetings with an investor.

For now, I’ve uploaded a UA Creatives lecture video that I’ve created for the gaming community in Oulu. You can check it out now.

To access the Youtube channel, click here.


Articles Worth Reading

+ How to design a better tutorial — This is a really good read on what it takes to build a great tutorial for your game. It matters so much that you can create a compelling setting for the player, so that they know what their role is in the game. Plus, you need to educate them on all the mechanics that are essential to doing well and progressing in the game.

+ Ultracasual games — I like how Homa Games is sharing their insights on the hypercasual genre. In this article, they talk about slicing hypercasual into three segments: casual, hypercasual, and ultracasual. The demographics and the audience are different, and you want to approach the publishing of these games in different ways. If you look at the current top game, Perfect Cream by Playgendary, you can see a great example of an ultracasual game.

+ Deconstructing Hay Day Pop (post #1) (post #2) (post #3) — Supercell has soft-launched their new game Hay Day Pop, and it’s already gathered lots of deconstructions. Here’s Department of Play’s article, Hadrian Semroud’s breakdown of the metagame and Harshal Karvande’s article on what Supercell is bringing to the match 3 puzzle games. These posts are worth the read for anybody who’s thinking about entering into the casual space.

Quote from this week

“Excellence is usually choosing the more difficult path which gives greater rewards” – Derek Sivers on the Modern Wisdom podcast