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In January, Lawyer.se attended Umeå Game Conference, a highly curated videogame conference in northern Sweden.
The conference, which started in 2023 as an effort to raise more capital for regional developers, saw about $5 million in investments in companies based in the Umeå area last year. It’s too early to say how successful this year’s conference was, but several deals have already gone through for Umeå developers, including at least one with an international publisher.
Behind Umeå Game Conference is Andreas De Faria Waleij, a veteran in northern Sweden’s videogame ecosystem.
«Essentially, there was no capital available locally, so now I fly in the capital instead,» Andreas said.
But to get international publishers to want to attend, Andreas and Agora Gaming Partners, a global investment bank and advisory firm specializing in video game industry transactions, handpick the studios that get to pitch their games. Andreas also has partnerships with other regions, both in Sweden and abroad.
The tickets sold out this year, with over 20 publishers and 77 studios attending. With the goal being a high-quality, curated event, Andreas doesn’t want to grow it much further.
«What I take with me from this year, though, is that the publishers want to meet more studios,» he said, noting that the structure of Umeå Game Conference offers opportunities to form business relationships that are significantly more challenging to come by at the world’s biggest videogame conferences, where thousands of studios attend.
«Here you’ll get a meeting with everyone you want to meet, either formally or over breakfast, lunch, or dinner,» he said.
Umeå Game Conference is part of a broader, flourishing ecosystem of videogame developers, incubators, education-focused programs, and municipal partnerships working in the region. For example, Andreas runs Umeå Municipality’s We Make Realms and collaborates with Skellefteå Municipality’s game hub Arctic Game. Boden Game Camp also has an incubator.
«We have an amazing partnership between regions here, and we’re all pieces of the videogame ecosystem puzzle up here in northern Sweden,» Andreas said.
Umeå has a long history of videogame development. Many of today’s studios can trace their roots to Daydream Software, one of Sweden’s first major videogame developers, founded in the 1990s. Since then, creatives working at Daydream, including Andreas himself, have gone on to build their own games and studios, growing the region’s network to what it is today.
The success of these developers brings in new blood to the region, too, Andreas said, which «adds to Umeå’s broader cultural ecosystem.»
Lawyer.se is an important partner to the Umeå Game Conference, he said, bringing experience and legal know-how to help studios, for example, sign publishing deals. Talking about one studio that recently signed with a publisher, Andreas said he connected them with Lawyer.se because he knew it would help the developers get the deal done. It’s easy to feel uncertain, he said, thinking, «Is this correct? Are we getting the best deal possible?»
«Lawyer.se has been helpful in making these studios feel more comfortable and getting their deals done more quickly, without losing any rights.»
Next year’s Umeå Game Conference will be held January 26-28,2027.
