The 10 Weeks To Save The Games Industry campaign continues. Matchmade CEO Jiri Kupiainen and GamesForest.Club’s Maria Wagner are sustainably travelling around Europe spreading the message to games makers and communities that we all need to get serious about what we can all do to help save the planet.
The message is a simple one. Unless we all get smarter about the necessity and logistics of our business travel, the global turnaround in CO2 production that we’re all praying for simply isn’t going to happen.
The duo are now four weeks into their campaign and each week they’ll be reporting into PG.biz and sharing a new video on their YouTube featuring comment from some of Europe’s finest game makers. Here’s the latest episode (with a video below). Be sure to subscribe to their YouTube channel here to keep up with their journey.
Jiri Kupiainen: 10 weeks to save the games industry is back on the rails, literally. Since arriving in mainland Italy, we’ve enjoyed all the modern and comfortable trains that Italy, Switzerland and Germany have had to offer. We also had a chance to check how night trains are today when we took the train from Munich to Budapest, and, after a night of not sleeping much at all, I would say that I very much look forward to trying the modern night trains being built by Austrian railways…
After drawing a blank in Italy, we had some great interviews in Zürich and Munich. I’m writing this from Budapest, where I unfortunately have to conclude that the Hungarian games industry is as elusive as the Italian one. I’m however optimistic about our next destinations in Central Europe, and of course the Nordic gaming capitals after that.
We did four interviews in Lisbon a couple of weeks ago, and in the end had so much good content that the episode had to be split into two parts. The first part with two impressive industry veterans Jeferson Valadares (Fortis) and Shanti Bergel (Transcend) both of whom were part of the Playfish mafia has proven quite popular, and I hope the second part doesn’t suffer the fate of our London episode’s part 2, which unfortunately hasn’t as yet had many views despite having incredible interviews with María from ustwo and Hilmar from CCP.
GDC is approaching and since the train connections to San Francisco are a bit poor, there is some FOMO in the air. Helsinki is one of our main destinations for this trip, and I hope we can still score some quality interviews despite many of the CEOs jetting over to the west coast. I hope they fly economy and do a proper job compensating their flights with reliable partners – carbon offsets offered by airlines are generally of questionable quality, and even when people mean well, they often don’t amount to anything in reality.
To catch all the episodes so far head to their YouTube here and find out more about their journey so far here: Intro, Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, Week 4, Week 5.