IGDA Finland Turku Hub, the year 2014 so far

Wow, the year 2014 started out in a hurry! We've already had 4 gatherings in the IGDA Finland Turku Hub! 2014 Started out with a stroke of bad luck with our gathering venue as we lost our dear old Ravintola Bryssel to Sedu in January! 1½ years worth of gatherings flew past in that venue so fast. We were left with some dear memories of the great atmosphere and the lively discussions from the venue sauna... So we found a new venue and the January Gathering was held in The Castle, which attracted almost 100 visitors since it was arranged with the Microsoft LevelUp -tour. Iraklis Grous from LudiCreations was over at the gathering the show off the Kickstarted board game Gear & Piston. It was mighty interesting to hear how they arranged a successful kickstarter campaign on a game that was actually developed in Finland.

The Castle was also a great place for an IGDA Finland gathering, but on the same evening we found out that The Castle was closing down! Talk about bad karma losing 2 venues in a row... So we were off again to find a new venue! Luckily it didn’t take long to find the next suitable venue: Hunter’s Inn! We had a “test run” gathering there in February and by looks of it all, we found a new great venue. In March we combined the evening with the Turku Game Day with Mikael Haveri from Housemarque also visiting us at the gathering. We had Resogun running on the bar's big screen and the people were really impressed with the game! (Luckily we had a 1080p projector...)

hunters

Come April and because of the need for more space, we arranged the gathering this time in our old (where it all began in 2011) venue Panimoravintola Koulu since we had a big guest for the evening, Wargaming.net! We had the biggest hall for us and free drinks for the evening and Alexander Shilyaev, the Director of Global Operations at Wargaming.net gave an insightful presentation about the growth of the company and other fun details along the journey. Suffice to say, it was a great evening for game developers and alike.

wargaming1