Video games in Finland

The most successful companies include Supercell, Rovio, Remedy Entertainment, Sulake, RedLynx, Frozenbyte and Housemarque.

The most important games developed in Finland include Stardust, Max Payne, Rally Trophy, Angry Birds, Clash of Clans, Cities: Skylines, Brawl Stars, Control and Ultrakill.

The top ten in 2014 were:[10] The history of the video game industry in Finland began in 1979, when a chess-game for the Telmac was published.

Source codes, usually in BASIC, were distributed on pages of home computing magazines such as MikroBitti.

[13] The first ever video game made in Finland, a chess-game called Chesmac for the Telmac, had been published in 1979.

[16] The Assembly was a gathering of amateurs, who created short demonstrations to show off their programming skills.

Pirates was an important factor in development of the demoscene: people who wanted to get games for free, learned how to break the copy protection.

[18] Samuli Syvähuoko started a company called Remedy Entertainment in his parents' garage with people he knew from the demoscene.

[19] The 1996 top-down racing game for DOS, Fatal Fumes, was the first project of a small Finnish group composed of four people.

[20] The Worms-like game on MS-DOS, Liero, was first released by Finnish programmer Joosa Riekkinen in 1998.

When Nokia introduced a primitive mobile web called WAP, some games were developed for that environment.

WAP technology was supposed to bring internet to mobile devices, but the usability was poor and data transfer was expensive.

Among the first one were Springtoys, a spring off of Housemarque, and Riot-E. International corporate giants invested 20 million euros in venture capital into Riot-E.

The mobile games started to look more attractive, when phones with colour displays and Java became more common.

Distribution of the games still needed contracts with individual tele operators who run their own application stores.

[23] August 2000 saw the opening of first version of Habbo - a social networking service and online community aimed at teenagers.

[24] Creators of the Habbo Hotel, Sampo Karjalainen and Aapo Kyrölä had earlier made an avatar application for the website of a band called mobile, and a snowballs game for marketing purposes of a tele operator.

[26] In traditional model, game developer is a subcontractor, and distribution is expensive due to costs of marketing, materials and shipping.

[27] In 2008 revenue of video game industry in Finland was 87 million euros, and it employed more than a thousand people.

Supercell launched three very popular free-to-play games: Hay Day and Clash of Clans in 2012 and Boom Beach in 2014.