Sweden Game Conference 2018

Marketing is not what used to be. Social networks and influencers now play a big role in promoting your game. In this talk you'll learn how to approach them and what tools are available for indie developers to promote their games effectively.

When games with large IPs and brands attached are released they’re always evaluated and angled to fit expectations among existing fans or to cater to new ones. But how can you as a developer set yourself up for success when dealing with multiple stakeholders, meet expectations, while retaining creative ownership?

This talk covers how to tweak your internal development process as well as practical tips and tricks learned from years of developing branded games to some of the worlds largest IPs and brands – and focuses on how to ensure that you can make great branded games without burning yourself, the IP or the team.

Agnieszka Molska Jakobson works at Ghost Games in Gothenburg as associate development manager, but her biggest focus is on the team. She is closely cooperating with the Ghost leadership championing positive change and strengthening the company culture.Born in Poland, became a teacher there and after moving to Sweden decided to change professions, following her true interests like project management, company culture and continuous improvement. 

Jillian will discuss exactly how and why she started her own companies, discussing wins with failures while providing advice on how to be a successful entrepreneur. There will be a focus on keeping your company and initiatives diverse and inclusive while helping drive towards a better, more positive industry.

How can a moddable hacking game can be a tool for digital activism? Rich Metson explores how videogames are the perfect medium for authentically exploring a political issue *with* your audience, and how you can build tools to facilitate this dialogue. After all, players who seek out games that are ‘about something’ are fairly likely to have something important to say about the subject themselves.

Any non conventional game can nowadays earn the label of Social Justice Propaganda. If you make “Social Justice Propaganda” you have a good chance to be called a “Social Justice Warrior”. Is this good or bad and how can you respond to this kind of comments? This is a reflection on how to interpret, handle and react to SJW commentary from a developer with two “Social Justice Propaganda” games under her belt.

Swedish company Gold Town Games (GTG) released their first game World Hockey Manager in the fall of 2017. The studio comprised of 18 employees from Skellefteå created the world’s first mobile “hockey manager”, a mobile game in a niche genre mixed with a sharp focus on a sport popular only in North America, Scandinavia and couple of countries in Europe.

During a fireside chat, Peter Fodor from AppAgent will run a business-oriented discussion with Pär Hultgren, CEO of GTG, on how the journey started, what were the challenges in a small town in the north of Sweden and how the game scaled to its current 100K+ new players monthly.

I step by step go through our journey into self-publishing. I explain why we used to get publishers. How it was to work with them. What they were good/ bad at. What we were afraid it would be like and what I turned out to be. I present common split scenarios that exist, which ones I think are fair and why.

With TABS we had the opportunity to choose whatever publisher we wanted but in our internal discussions we kept coming back to the question "what do they do". Since we couldn't figure that out we didn't know the value of what they were providing.
Because of this, we decided to self-publish. We accepted that we might be worse at it than them but if we tried and failed. At least we would know what we were paying for in the future.

Self-publishing has taught us a lot about marketing and the platform process. I explain how I tackled self-publishing from 0 experience. What I found was surprisingly hard and what was surprisingly easy. I also supply tips if someone would like to try it themselves.

The talk title sounds very Anti-publishing. The talk is not anti-publishing itself and mentions a lot of positive aspects of working with publishers but the goal is to supply people with some initial tools to go into self-publishing if they feel up to it

Violence, addiction or obesity?
Games are still blamed for bad things people do outside of them, but does it really matter what politicians or media thinks about games as long as people love to play?
Yes it does, and the perception of games will affect who will become a developer and what future games will look like.
This is a talk about why you should care about politics and games.