The HQ of Io-Interactive plays host to today’s discussion, our meeting table flanked by a row of super-deformed Agent 47s standing watch on shelves along one wall, and life-size statues of Kane & Lynch – apparently engaged in a dispute – on the other. Aside from the menagerie of game characters, IOI is represented by general manager Hannes Seifert and gameplay director Christian Elverdam. Martin Munk Pollas, who helped to found both IOI and Reto-Moto, is here too, along with Unity CTO Joachim Ante, Press Play studio director Rune Dittmer and MovieStarPlanet CEO Claus Lykke Jensen. PlayDead director Arnt Jensen and CEO Dino Patti round out the group. After seeing off a stack of sandwiches, we set about the benefits of informality, Copenhagen’s close relationship with Malmö, and why international investors should be taking a serious look at the region.
For you, what’s great about Copenhagen?
Hannes Seifert: What I really like about it is it’s size. It’s quite a small city, but it feels very metropolitan at the same time. For me it’s the epitome of the modern city when you consider its public transportation, its accommodation of bicycles, the mix of modern and old architecture. People here know how to party, but they also know how to relax. Overall, it’s a combination that’s hard to find anywhere else in the world.
Joachim Ante: When you live here it’s normal, but the number of bicycles is a beautiful thing. I almost had to cry when I first came here and saw these big queues of bicycles at the lights that are bigger than the queues of cars. That’s how it should be.
Martin Munk Pollas: I spoke to some of our foreign employees before coming here today, and it looks like they agree with all of that. They noted the quality of life here in general, and said that local people were very friendly and helpful. And of course almost everybody speaks English.
HS: That’s a really good point. I think I’ve met fewer than four people in my past four years here that did not speak English.
And what would you say characterises the development scene here?
Dino Patti: It’s small!
HS: I personally like the mix of talent here. There are a lot of extremely creative people here, and there’s a lot of technical talent too. Both can be found elsewhere, of course, but the combination at this level is rare. I think that comes with being a smaller country: you think beyond your borders.
Claus Lykke Jensen: There’s very little hierarchy in companies here; we all have very flat structures. I think this means people take more ownership of the task, and that gives better results. Because everybody contributes to where the company’s going, it’s not just one person directing everything.
Christian Elverdam: If you look at the quality of what’s produced compared to how many people are here, I think the standard is pretty incredible. Normally you’d attribute that kind of work to teams of hundreds of people. But one big US studio could almost be equivalent to the entire Danish scene!
JA: It seems to me that the proportion of small startup companies and really small productions is very high in Copenhagen, which makes for an interesting indie scene. It’s very strong – especially considering there aren’t that many bigger studios. I mean, there’s basically… IOI. [Laughter.]
HS: There was a core demo scene in the ’80s and ’90s, which I come from, and that’s still felt. I encounter people all the time that I met sending disks or letters to in the past. Many of these people stayed in the industry and I think that is perhaps one of the reasons for this mix: because it required you to be very technical – it was all about showing off – but also to be creative.
Is that a contributing factor to many older studios’ focus on in-house tech here?
HS: I think we like to push boundaries. And to push boundaries you sometimes have to produce your own tech. I’m not religious about using our own technology, but wherever you can make a real difference with it, you should.
MMP: I think there’s also a tradition that many products here started life as tech: you’d make the tech and then figure out what to build around it. I’m not saying that’s the right way to go about doing a game, but that happened quite a lot!
CE: And I think that still happens today. I mean, look at us: we’re very open to the fact that some guy could invent something, and then that could turn into a game feature if we find the right application for it. The crowd system in the Hitman games started just as a mental challenge: how many characters can we render? It didn’t have any real AI, if you look back at Blood Money for instance, but then obviously it became a tech challenge to try to build crowds on a new level. Those kind of evolutions come about partly because it’s close to the core fantasy of what we do, but also partly because there are people here who really like the intellectual challenge of tackling a problem like that. And I think that goes across every company – you have people that are deeply invested in the technology.
Rune Dittmer: The short answer is that Danish coders really like a challenge! But I’d like to challenge your initial observation a bit: I come from a very non-tech company and we’ve been based in Unity from day one. And I think the majority of companies our size – 25 and under – are using licensed tech now. I think these companies are being founded by younger people than IOI was, perhaps, coming out of ITU [the IT University of Copenhagen] or other universities who weren’t part of any demo or tech scene, and they have a different perspective on technology. There’s a lot of focus on design in education, and I think many of the younger Danish companies are design-driven rather than tech-driven now. We definitely count as one of those.
CLJ: We’re also not particularly tech-orientated, instead focusing on experience and users. We really don’t want to have to invent any tech, we just want to invent gameplay and games. And we have had a lot of people come to the company from ITU, which attracts people from all different kinds of backgrounds: some are programmers, some are nurses, some are engineers. They come to the MSc in Games with bachelor degrees from so many other paths and that gives a really broad knowledge. I think that builds upon what we had with the demo scene in the old days, creating a much broader audience – not just the core, but other people who are interested in making games. It’s fantastic that we have ITU in Denmark.
HS: On that point, it’s worth noting that Denmark is much more equal opportunities-orientated than many other countries, which I think is also part of the reason why there’s so much talent coming from all directions. As a society we’re very equal. Diversity allows you to make internationally appealing games for a broad audience and you need different inputs otherwise you can’t shape and polish your games.
So do studios get involved with ITU’s courses?
CE: We have a lot of guys from ITU – I’m one of them myself! At the moment we have a great programming and technical Masters team that are doing procedural content studies that we think are interesting. What ITU really understands is how to integrate business and education without being overly commercial in its thinking
RD: But to answer your question more directly, we do feedback as well. For example, participating in guest lectures and activities around that. And I personally try to play through the projects each semester to keep an eye on up and coming talent.
HS: I think it’s important in our industry to follow academic trends. Because sometimes they’ll be research that might not be applicable today, but it points to where you can be in five years and that’s really interesting.
CLJ: We value kids’ safety highly – it’s one of our top priorities – so we actually have somebody at ITU researching how we can improve online safety in our games. How can we better prioritise our moderators? So it’s not just game design, but also infrastructure and content management. And, as a company, we also started in ITU’s incubator.
Considering the ever-increasing importance of middleware, has it been a boon having Unity on your doorstep?
CLJ: While we’re not using Unity ourselves, I think a lot of companies locally have gained from that proximity. Some of the companies already had close relationships, of course, and that helps Unity to know what devs want, too.
JA: We’re much more globally orientated than we used to be, of course, but we still do a lot of talks in Copenhagen. We get involved in local game jams too, for example.
DP: Actually I think we used that closeness quite a lot – we had a programmer visiting us regularly. Unity’s so big now, though, that it’s getting hard to get special features put in! [Laughter.]
JA: Yeah, but with PlayDead there’s some features that you guys are working on – you actually have access to the software and there’s some features that go into Unity, as far as I know?
Arnt Jenssen: Sometimes, yeah! It’s a pretty close collaboration.
JA: We meet up with studios and often get ideas. But a lot of that is also coming through mailing lists because obviously we don’t want to only cater to Copenhagen. It’s very important for us to be global. We have a pretty big field engineering team whose members are located all over the world, but since a lot of engineers are actually in Copenhagen and they don’t spend that much time going around the world themselves, in that sense there’s a slightly different connection to studios here. Engineers working on features not only talk directly to studios but also know developers personally. I know some of the guys working on Unity today helped PlayDead ship Limbo, and we’ve got some former IOI employees too, so there’s a big mixture.
There’s a surprising informality to the way studios work and interact here. Where do you think that comes from?
RD: You’re right, it’s very open compared to other scenes. I have five to ten game executives that I will share basically everything with. From everything I hear – and most of that is from other Microsoft studios these days – that is very unique to Copenhagen, that we are so open with so many potential competitors. I think as a people we Danes enjoy informality almost to the point that it gets a bit complicated when we try to integrate with the rest of the world! [Laughter.] I think we celebrate it, and personally I think it’s a very positive thing, but it makes it difficult for us sometimes to have foreign employees coming in, or to interact with other organisations like publishing partners and whatnot. If we see something that’s even slightly formal, we get a bit scared, and I think it’s something that we need to work on: to not let the informality become impolite, because I think it does that sometimes.
HS: I know what you mean. Sometimes, perhaps when you interact with Asian business partners, for example, you need to be a bit different, but overall I think it’s a very good balance. One of our foreign employees once said that the Danes consider themselves the Mediterranean of Scandinavia, and I think that shows in the culture.
CE: I think some level of informality is generally the case in this industry, right? But I think it’s surprising to others that it’s also like that at the corporate level here. It is informal but it’s not always that way – especially when you meet people from other countries, for example.
CLJ: But the really positive thing about it is that it’s all to do with the fact that there’s much less hierarchy in companies here. So I think what that really means is that people feel they can say whatever they like to anybody in the company without having to go through a chain of people. And I think that makes more ideas come out. Ideas that might not surface in other countries maybe have a higher chance of being produced here because of this informality and lack of hierarchy.
CE: I think because of this culture, on an individual level people expect influence, and to be heard no matter what function they might have in the company. And a significant part of how we organise ourselves is around that. Obviously we need to make decisions and do all sorts of other official stuff, but to some people it’s a real culture shock: that not only do a lot of different people express their opinions on a lot of different matters, but also that they are required to do so themselves to some extent. So if you’re very silent and just expect to get told what to do, then people might look at you strangely and ask if you’re OK! Here, people demand to be heard and to be able to express themselves. It’s perhaps more acute in the creative industry, but it’s also throughout society in general, I believe.
DP: It’s important to me that people can wear slippers if they want. [Laughter.]
RD: We’ve had employees borrowing formal shoes from each other when they had to go to funerals, because they didn’t have any of their own!
JA: That’s really interesting. I always thought ensuring people had a lot of input on a lot of things was a Unity thing. It’s a massive culture shock for the people we employ from the States. When they come from a US perspective, they’re like, “Why is one of my developers, who doesn’t know anything about business, telling me how to do this thing? What the fuck?” I always thought that was Unity culture, but I now see that it’s perhaps a wider Denmark thing, that we have this very open culture where ideas can come from anywhere, and the best ideas survive.
Do you think your proximity to Sweden offers any benefits?
RD: I think for this feature we could have considered inviting studios from Malmö as well, because I think there are a lot of developers going across the bridge, commuting either way. To that extent, even though we say the Copenhagen scene is rather small we could easily include the Malmö scene in that – which adds a Ubisoft studio of a few hundred devs! [Laughter.] I think the two cities are pretty integrated. I mean, I don’t have any Swedish executives that I hang out with or discuss business secrets with, but I think on an employee level they do.
HS: We have quite a few employees that commute. There are two currencies, of course, and things like that, but there are a lot of agreements between the countries – it’s a pretty fluent relationship.
CE: If you take the Malmö region even outside of the game industry it’s very connected because obviously it’s a smaller city right next to a capital city, right? It makes sense. If you define the Copenhagen area, in a way, Malmö should be included, because so much is exchanged.
HS: Copenhagen airport is actually halfway between Copenhagen and Malmö, too!
Does the government provide much financial support for game developers here?
RD: I think, looking in from the outside, it appears more involved than it actually is. There are schemes available, and we’re well aware that not everywhere is as lucky. But I think the fact of the matter is that the schemes are rather small. They’ve definitely had an impact on the number of small studios that are able to put forward ideas, but I still think we should ask for better, and more extensive, schemes.
HS: My impression is that it’s mostly involved in incubation, focusing on startups and training. That’s obviously a good thing, but as you get larger you grow out of these benefits. There’s nothing here that compares with, say, Canada
or Finland.
RD: I think an important distinction to be made is that the schemes that do exist are all arts schemes, so nothing like the Finnish and Canadian ones that are thought of as business or industry aid. The Danish schemes all revolve around culture and art and are about ensuring that Danish games are being produced here, but not necessarily about growing the industry.
CE: I completely agree that it lacks ambition and an understanding of how big an industry gaming really is. We are reaching out globally, and in that sense it doesn’t really fit the bill right now.
RD: It would be awesome if we had something like Finland’s Tekes fund, something that’s not necessarily driven from an art perspective but is still benefiting a broader industry. I think we should be happy there’s a European arts grant in Denmark, but from my perspective it’s more important to attract more private investment. And, at least for the first few years, they’ll have to come from outside because I don’t think there’s a great deal of games investment expertise in Denmark.
Could your close links with Malmö provide a possible answer?
RD: I’ve been in meetings where that has been discussed, but I’ve yet to see it happen.
HS: I think in Europe it’s still very difficult to work with a national institution across international borders. I’ve seen successful programmes on the European network, but I think when it comes to cross-country co-operation it’s usually more successful when it’s not driven by a national government. It’s no different in the UK – some of these schemes have to be driven more centrally to work. I think there’s still a long way to go. Funding and subsidies should never distort business, but I think they’re distorting it to our disadvantage in some areas right now. There’s a lot of things around, especially in terms of Copenhagen’s infrastructure and all the benefits, that people take for granted – many things are cheap compared to other countries or even free, not least our education! That’s very good here, but there are other areas too. I think that’s good to know when you’re considering this city. And when it comes to investment, I think it’s worth pointing out that Denmark is the least corrupt country in the world!
MMP: A general problem when it comes to investment in games in Denmark is that companies and organisations here aren’t willing to take a risk with bigger setups – two people making a huge success is what they want to invest in.
RD: But if you look at the smaller successes here, like Limbo or Subway Surfers [an endless runner created by Kiloo Games, based in Denmark’s second largest city, Aarhus], you’ll have either Fund Cat [a venture capital fund established as part of the CAT Science Park] or public funding. So in all of those successes, local investment played a role at some point – often at the earliest stages.
MMP: Yeah, but my point is that it would be nice if they were willing to take a bigger risk and not get scared off by, say, a 20 million krona budget or something like that.
How can that be addressed?
DP: We need to make more successes, of course. But we also need to find money internationally.
HS: I think that’s a much easier solution.
RD: I think for European investors in general, and especially UK-based companies, there’s a real opportunity here because the Danes lack that expertise. I think many of the companies are ready for it – they’ve been pretty well prepared and I think they would thrive with private funding. And you could probably get them at a bargain price right now! [Laughter]
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