After a 9-month period of planning, designing and executing the Bit1 2022 event, we are here: Bit1 is officially wrapped. We had a blast, and hopefully you did too! Thank you so much for taking part in Bit1 2022. Let’s get into some details of the final and everything that happened after. By the way, you can find all the Bit1 streams later here, if you want to see it or relive the experience! We’re still transferring all the Twitch streams, so don’t worry if you can’t see all of the materials right away on the channel.
First of all, this article is filled with amazing event pictures all captured by the fantastic Lauri Ellilä. Thank you!
The last remote Bit1 competitions have, of course, been very meaningful as well, but when the competition happens live it reaches its full potential. For that we have so many people to thank – our participants, juries, mentors, speakers, audiences, sponsors Boom Corp and Metacore, our own production team and the staff at Tiivistämö. Thanks to all of you, the final went smoothly. Check out the stats from the picture below, but get this! We had a whopping 100-person live audience and 200 people following the stream on Twitch! Nice turnout. Thank you to everyone for making the Bit1 2022 final more amazing than ever before!
At the Bit1 2022 final we also had Game Makers of Finland and We in Games sharing their valuable knowledge. Upcoming years we’d love to have more space for different exhibitors, making the event even more informative, especially for game students.
Game Makers of Finland were spreading awareness of their important union work in the gaming industry in Finland. We in Games, together with the National Council of Women of Finland and the Department of Justice, were advocating for representations of gender in games.
We’ve introduced the Bit1 2022 final jury before, but here’s a quick recap:
Juha Huhtakallio – father of Bit1 competition, General Manager at PlayStack. PlayStack offers an audience for the winner of Bit1 2022, Normogames.
Olseja Marjalaakso – Head of New Games at Next Games
Jaakko Kemppainen – Regional Artist of Games as Art at Arts Promotion Centre Finalnd. Kemppainen offers the winner of Bit1 2022 Normogames mentorship after the competition.
Sonja Ängeslevä – CEO at Phantom Labs and a board member at Remedy. We’ve mistakenly advertised her previous position as a Product Lead at Zynga, sorry! She’s moved on but we haven’t.
And last but not least, Petri Ikonen – Senior Creative Director at Electronic Arts Finland.
We think we can speak for everyone when we say that we’re deeply grateful for the insight these top professionals have shared with us at the final! Their top tips being: Make sure your game stands out, think about the monetization of the game and most importantly – be passionate! Gaming industry is a tough field, and it’ll be difficult to manage without that spark and love for game making.
Then here’s a recap from our speakers, too! Unfortunately Suvi Kiviniemi couldn’t participate in the final, but luckily our program was still full of interesting and educational speeches.
Jaakko Kemppainen started with “Game, Art, Business – A Love Triangle”. Suvi Latva from Neogames continued with an introductory topic “What’s up at Finnish Game Industry” followed by Jon Jelinski, Backend Programmer at Metacore, with “Are you serving the player? Or yourself?”. Lastly, Elina Sievänen from We in Games Finland finished up with a speech on diversity and inclusiveness in the games industry.
The speeches followed a theme of how to balance the three attributes of game making: How to create a game that caters to your target group, but at the same time is interesting and meaningful for the creator, whilst trying to make money out of it. Each aspect got examined in these perfectly designed speeches.
We were celebrating our Bit1 2022 winner Normogames at the Finnish Game Awards 2022. They had the honor of receiving the Bit1 trophy on the stage of FGA in front of the Finnish game industry people. Must’ve been exciting! They totally deserve the recognition, we’re sure there’ll be big things happening in Normogames’ future. Speaking of which, we were super happy to see our previous Bit1 winner from 2019, Team Sockman, now known as Nighthouse Games, nominated for the Big Screen Game of the Year 2021 with their winning game Sockman. We’re so proud and can’t wait to see more of our previous participants nominated and winning trophies at the FGA gala!
Check out the FGA 2022 stream here.
Outside of the results of the competition, that’s the summary of the Bit1 final 2022! Our team is truly grateful for every and each one of you, and hopefully we’ll be seeing you next year! We appreciate the feedback you’ve given us, but please feel free to message us on our socials or at info@bit1.fi if there’s anything more you’d like to share with us about the experience. Stay tuned for Bit1 2023!
