Dreaming of Your Own Game Studio?
We Are Starting Game Village Jörn For You!

If you’d like to establish a new game studio, we want to connect with you. We are currently building a new kind of startup scene for game studios. We know the importance of team, time and learning in game development. Which is why we have built a Game Village where we will offer up to five teams one year of 100% game development in a peaceful environment.

We will build a professional studio together during that year. We’ll help with financing, administration, contracts/negotiations and sales. Furthermore, we’ll include support by experienced game developers and producers via Arctic Game Lab. Jörn will help with a great heart, living conditions, food and a rich set of extracurricular activities such as skiing, bathing, gym, bowling. Our site manager is also working on creating the right culture to nurture your studio into success and you to thrive.

Game Village Jörn

We are situated in the old entertainment center in Jörn. We have remade the restaurant into a modern studio environment situating up to five teams or 20-30 developers. The building also has an old theater and ballroom in the basement. These spaces will carefully be renovated to bring into the Game Village fold during the next few years. Next door to the Game Village there are rooms to rent with a common kitchen. If you would prefer, there are also separate apartments as well as houses to rent (or buy).

First Year Target

Together we will build a studio that can sustain your salaries in the short run, and in the longer run create magic with you as the majority shareholders. To be able to accomplish this, the focus will be in developing your professionalism. If we can achieve this, the road is open for publishing deals, new investment rounds, or other types of income sources. This way we can create the financial platform for your studio to be successful.

The year will be an intense one for the teams. The games will be developed in close collaboration with established game developers and studios. The first brush with reality will be upon us already in November during the meeting with international publishers and investors we have planned.

Why Are We Doing This?

To start a game studio is hard. There are challenges to both be able to pull off the game, the organization, the finances, the network and contract negotiations. These challenges often make the beginning phase much longer than planned, and each delay might mean you need to sell off parts of your company to a degree that the founder might not even have that much left when a game finally lifts.

This was for example the case for Arrowhead with Magicka, their first game. Arrowhead of today is a very successful studio who are interested in helping other studios get a more smooth ride in the beginning. Arrowhead and Mind Detonator have build a startup process that we hope will shorten the journey to a sustainable studio 1-3 years, which would enable the founders to keep a larger part of the studio and games. To make this happen, finances are needed which is why local investor Örjan Berglund has chosen to provide office space and housing as well as be part of funding the studios. This way he hopes that games can be part of the future in Jörn.

Our ambition is to grow and increase the number of Game Villages in the coming years and be able to finance 15-20 new game studios each year. To make financing easier we plan to do an IPO for Mind Detonator in 3-5 years. In doing that, we would enable studios to be able to become owners of the Game Village itself and get access to the high value that comes with an IPO.

Jörn

Jörn is situated close to the railroad and about 45 minutes from Skellefteå by car. It is a growing village where a hotel is being built which will also have a large event restaurant, brewery and bowling alley. There is also a very nice bath house with a gym and sports arena, as well as a downhill ski slope. This is all free of charge for game developers in the Game Village. There are also things happening in e-commerce and tourism in the local region.