MCV/DEVELOP News, events, research and jobs from the games industry
Our special report on the Finnish game industry continues today with a look at a developer that has long been involved in Scandinavia’s established demoscene.
Everyplay
Location: Helsinki
Headcount: 5
IPs: TBC
Specialty: Social networking
A start-up specialising in games that run within social networks, Everyplay describes itself as currently running in stealth mode.
The studio is presently working on a concept that combines real world avatars made of paper with gaming communities based in the likes of Facebook. While little has been confirmed, Everyplay hopes to allow for interconnected play between MySpace, Beebo, Facebook and others using microtransactions to fund the concept, which is due for a soft launch sometime soon.
Everyplay’s managing director Jussi Laakkonen is not new to the games industry, having worked for Bugbear Entertainment, which created the Flatout series of games.
“I’m honestly complete fed up with working with publishers,” confesses Laakkonen. “I’ve tried for four-and-a-half years trying to make it work, and it’s just a really hard relationship for developers, especially today. Unless you’re Bungie or Epic or one of those with financial freedom, it’s always tug of war.”
Laakkoneni is actually a man more interested in development far closer to the grass roots level, and is a proactive proponent of Scandanavia’s demoscene.
Laakkonen and his colleagues at Everyplay are closely involved in organising Assembly, which attracts over 5000 demoscene fans to Helsinki to share demos, and decide on the best ou put of the year, which is sometimes of surprisingly high quality.
