IGDA Finland’s Post

So it came to pass that Expa Game Business Cooperative earned the status of Finland's first and the world's northernmost Unreal Authorized Training Center (UATC) by Epic Games. Once again I wish to thank Epic Games and its awesome business and education developers who reviewed our hub in great detail, validating the many years of work by the active community that have given birth a ton of business, community activities, accumulated knowledge and collaborations and career opportunities in the form of many local companies, hundreds of meetups and events, projects, reports, education and job hunting programs and more. The biggest and most important individual effort remains the establishment and stabilization of our community hub and collaboration space Digi & Game Center, where also the Unreal training will take place. What does this mean? For the city of Jyväskylä, the Unreal training will benefit dozens of local and locally operating companies. Applications vary from manufacturing, to marketing to broadcasting. Expa is looking to bring clientele and partners onsite and online to Jyväskylä and connect them with the local opportunities and value network. For the Finnish game developer community the UATC is an opportunity to grow your expertise, develop your company's operations and strategy - but also an opportunity to build collaborations beyond the game dev bubble with various industries that make more and more use of game tech every day! In general this means increasing know-how, enthusiastic people trying out new ideas, building new projects, business and research with the opportunity for world class partnerships. So what's next? First we are setting up our resources and premises online and onsite. We're talking new hardware, online portals, tutorials and more. Simultaneously we're diving into curriculum development. We're working together with our local cross-industry hub, universities and global partners to identify the demand. While we will surely provide introductory level resources, the focus of the training center will be in advanced courses and industry-specific training. While all of the above is sure to take several months, we operate in a lean way and are looking to start the first trainings as soon as possible. So stay tuned! Peliosuuskunta Expa (Expa Game Business Co-operative) Digi & Game Center Epic Games Unreal Engine Jyväskylän kaupunki - City of Jyväskylä JAMK University of Applied Sciences University of Jyväskylä IGDA Finland Tuomas Roininen Daniel Imbert Ari Arnbjörnsson Richard Salo Chris Ebeling Luke Savage