Game conference survival guide

If you are a game developer, graphic designer, sound designer, coder, producer, publisher etc. and you work in the gaming industry, the chances are that you will go to a gaming related conference at least once in your lifetime. I want to share with you this checklist that I made before I went to White Nights Helsinki '16 happening on February 12th. Maybe some of you find this useful!

Before you go

• Read the conference programme
  Plan ahead which seminars and panel discussions you want to see.

• What is your goal?
  Looking for distributor or people to work with? Arrange meetings with people. Most conferences have matchmaking tools to help you find right folks for you. 

• What booths are there?
  Plan ahead which booths would be useful for you to visit.

• Install conference app
  Most conferences have an app for visitors to connect and to keep up to date.

• Remember toothbrush!

On location

• Paper and pen
  This might sound old fashioned but at least for me, writing down things in a notebook is often more efficient than using electronic device to write things down. Many of the conferences provide notebook and pencils within check in bag but don't count on it. You might also want to take pictures of slides instead of writing them down.

• The Power
  Most likely you are gonna use heavily your mobile devices, tablets and laptops. So if or when you run out of juice, keep your charger with you and locate a free power outlet. I have not yet visit a conference where there are places with enough power outlets where you could load your device(s). You can also keep extra batteries with you. 

• The Party
  Most conferences have parties. These are the best places to meet new contacts and talk to different people. Just don't get too happy with the drinks or you might corrupt your precious brain data storage for the evening and ruin your performance the next day ;) 

Aftermath

When the trip is done you might want to take time to sum up your work. If you did not already connect with your new contacts in facebook, twitter and LinkedIn, do it now. Also, store received business cards with notes somewhere where you find them when you need them. It easy to forget, mix up faces and names and positions and companies and what you talked about.

PGC London 2016

The Frak guys traveled all the way from Tampere Finland to a sunny and warm (on finnish standards) London to have a good time at Pocket Gamer Connects London 18-19th of january 2016. The angle for this journey was to promote our upcoming mobile game Gladiator Bastards and network with the people in the business. Here is a very brief video shot at the conference location at The Brewery.


There was a nice variety of upcoming mobile games and game related applications. Even few VR based apps. It was great to notice that fellow Finns were probably the most presented nationality in the conference outside the British! In the basement floor the clear majority of booths were from Finnish companies.

With so much going on it was hard to find time to catch all the interesting seminars and panel discussions. East meets west was a big topic. The mobile market in Asia is very different in the east than it is in the West. The importance of localization and finding a good distributor for your game in Asia are vital tools if one wants to succeed in the large markets like China or Japan. Also what was pretty enlightening to me was to hear experiences involving the IP usage in games in the dev point of view and also from the IP owners. You don't necessarily need to be a large company to use external IP!

All in all it was a rough two days but it was worth it!