A working meeting of the Interreg project Baltic Game Industry (BGI) was held in Helsinki on 29 and 30 January 2019 and brought together project partner organizations and other experts from Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, and Germany. The Berlin Senate Chancellery took part in the meeting in the context of its membership in Baltic Metropoles.
Represented by BGZ (Berliner Gesellschaft für internationale Zusammenarbeit mbH), Berlin is heading the BGI project, which got its start a year and a half ago and is aimed at improving general conditions for the game industry in the Baltic Sea region.
On the first day, the participants discussed the progress made with the project in each city. Thanks to the project partner Neogames, a hub for the game industry in Finland, all of the project partners were able to attend a reception held for the game scene and to gain valuable insight – for instance, into how Neogames is helping to design public libraries to make them more “playful.”
On the second day, the participants toured the Games Factory – a central location that provides office space for small and medium-sized game development studios, an incubator, venues for network meetings, and more. The tour not only made a strong impression on the visitors, but gave them a model going forward, since the project goals include setting up and connecting games hubs of this kind in the partner countries.
This experience was followed by a visit to the Finnish investment bank Business Finland, which laid out the various funding programs available to companies, as well as the overarching strategy supporting the development of the game industry in Finland, and gave the participants useful insights into public funding for the games sector.
The Senate Chancellery also took advantage of the trip to exchange ideas with Helsinki’s city administration.
