Biografen Skandia opened its doors at 8.30am on Wednesday 16th May for Breakit’s first conference for gaming and investments. Stockholm has not been well served with gaming conferences despite its importance to the industry, but there were high quality and interesting delegates, a gratifyingly high quality of moderators and panellists, good themes, and even the cardamon buns were top-class! Next year the venue should be packed.
We heard from Swedbank Robur’s Erik Spinchorn, and Carnegie Private Banking’s Henrik von Sydow as Sweden’s foremost institutional investors and suppliers of private capital to startups. They were accompanied by Markus Nyström from DICE, Sweden’s biggest developer, Jana Palm from startup incubator Stugan, and the Staffan Ekström from EY and Niclas Holmberg Head of Global Listing Services at Nasdaq.
This was a heavyweight panel in itself, but there were four panels, and two in-depth interviews, and two keynote speeches, all of a good quality and adding insights. My laptop died twice while taking notes, and my camera was constantly screen grabbing many good quality slides.
I had a chance to exchange experience with representatives from Swedbank, recruitment consultants and speak to the sponsors Elias Interactive, Tobii and Epic, and Cortopia Studios. No time was wasted!
Paradox’s CEO in-waiting, Ebba Ljungerud interviewed by Per Strömbäck, from the Swedish Gaming Industry Association
There was not much interest from the press with only one journalist present despite high quality interviews with three of the most exciting CEOs in Stockholm at the moment: Ebba Ljungerud (Paradox), Arnd Benninghoff (MTGx) and David Polfeldt (Massive). Dagens Industri though jumped on the bandwagon two days later!
Dagens Industri 2018-05-18
Portfolio comments:
What I wanted from his conference is an opportunity to refine my understanding of the industry. Two key points stood out for me:
– the investment story is still focussed on the “next big thing” its all about early capital and IPOs, new trends such as AR even Blockchain was mentioned ad nauseam as a key factor over the next five years. The Nikeforos portfolio has not been built around IPO bets, there are always going to be people (HNWs and PE funds) who can get in on the ground floor on a mega-ride such as Rovio or King. But with 8 000 games a year launched just on Steam and another 36 000 games launched on Apple’s App Store a year there is a lot of luck involved.
– a key for those developers who have made it despite having one key product, Mojang (Minecraft), Rovio (Angry Birds) is owning the IP (not licensing it), this gives the comfort and long-term security of the merchandising and cross-selling that secures a steady income that licensing based models do not get. For investors, a developer with its own IP can have a much higher upside than a company that is always going to be working on other’s IP. My bets in major IP holders like Time Warner and Walt Disney have not been spectacular payoffs yet but my faith in their position in the gaming universe was strengthened by hearing how desperate the search for good IP is, and the stability they bring to the portfolio allows some more exciting rides such as Paradox which has been this week’s present, up 26% this week at 165 SEK, having had a good ride already having been acquired by the Portfolio at 33 SEK!
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