Do I need someone from a big studio like Supercell to be a strong gaming cofounder?

No. Studio pedigree helps with credibility and fundraising conversations, but plenty of strong small teams form around someone who's shipped a handful of smaller titles independently and understands live-ops, monetisation, and retention from actually running a game, not just building one.

Should a gaming startup be technical-first or design-first when picking a cofounder?

It depends on the game. A systems-heavy or technically ambitious title benefits from a strong engineering cofounder first. A game whose whole bet is feel, art direction, or a specific creative hook benefits from pairing a technical founder with someone design-led early, not after the prototype is done.

Is the games industry in Helsinki only mobile?

Mobile is the dominant local strength given Supercell's history, but it isn't the only lane. PC/console indie teams and services-for-games startups (tooling, analytics, live-ops platforms) also form here, often by people who came out of the same studio ecosystem but aren't building a game themselves.

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Finding a gaming cofounder in Helsinki

Helsinki is the city that produced Supercell, and the mobile-games talent pool that grew around it is still one of the deepest in Europe. Finding a gaming cofounder here usually means choosing between someone from that same ex-studio network and someone earlier-career who's shipped smaller games solo or on a small team.

By Curtis ThomasLast updated 2026-08-06

Why Helsinki's gaming pool is unusual for a city this size

Supercell's success pulled a disproportionate amount of games talent, capital, and know-how into Helsinki relative to the city's size, and much of it stayed local rather than dispersing. That means a real, if not huge, pool of people who have shipped and run live mobile games at scale, which is a genuinely different skill from having built a game as a portfolio project. See the full Helsinki cofounder pagefor who's listed today.

What actually differentiates a gaming cofounder

Whether they've run live-ops on a shipped title (retention tuning, monetisation, content cadence) versus only having built and shipped once.
Which engine and platform they're strongest in, since mobile F2P, premium PC/console, and web/instant games pull from different toolchains and, often, different personalities.
Whether the split you need is technical/creative (engineer plus art or design lead) or technical/commercial (engineer plus someone who owns publishing, UA, and monetisation).

Where to start looking

Write your "Looking for" text with the specific game genre and platform, not just "gaming cofounder" — a hyper-casual mobile team and a narrative-driven indie team are looking for completely different people even though both are "games." If you already know you need someone technical first, start with technical cofounders in Helsinki; if you have the build and need someone to own publishing and growth, growth cofounders in Helsinki is the closer fit.

Browse the public directoryto see who's actively looking right now.