Kokoon Games, based in Helsinki, is a new studio founded by industry veterans Henri Lindgren, Jaakko Sarno and Ville Valtiala.
The studio aims to transform party games by addressing an underserved market segment with its debut title. Backed by some of the leading angel investors in gaming, Kokoon Games is set to make a significant mark in the industry.
Henri Lindgren, CEO and Co-Founder, brings over 15 years of industry experience, having held key leadership roles and successfully overseeing the development of numerous popular mobile games.
Jaakko Sarno, Chief Creative Officer and Co-Founder, is a seasoned game designer with over a decade of experience, specializing in innovative and engaging mobile game design.
Kokoon’s CTO Ville Valtiala is a veteran from Lightneer and previously held the CTO position at Makea Games.
What motivated you to establish Kokoon Games?
I had the opportunity to reflect on my internal motivations a lot during the past year and what really stood out for me was my passion to bring people together. Bringing different friend groups together to make new friends.
Knowing that my next passion was to set up my own studio I really wanted to emphasize this unity with Kokoon. We think there’s a lot of room for innovation in the fast growing party game space and what’s a better way to bring people together than great party games, right?
It was also important that the northern star of the company is really strong for my co-founders. I couldn’t ask for a better founding team than Jaakko and Ville and we feel really passionate about our “why”.
With our mission statement of “bringing people together through play” and “Kokoon” meaning “get together” in Finnish, we’re really emphasizing togetherness with our vision. We want to create games with strong local-play incentives and low barriers of entry while keeping the quality high.
We also think there’s also a strong global need for this kind of content right now with more and more people suffering from loneliness – especially Gen-Z. I know we can’t save the world by developing games but having the opportunity to make this kind of impact is very meaningful for us.
How did you, Ville and Jaakko decide to team up for the Kokoon Games?
We have all actually worked together for years at our previous company Lightneer. I was the CEO and Ville and Jaakko were key team members responsible for creating games that ended up being big hits with over 150 million downloads.
We know each other’s ways of working and our passion for creating games that glue people together was one of the main reasons we wanted to group up. Dream team I’d say!
And I know Jaakko and Ville feel the same. We actually do systematic co-founder coaching with professional psychologists and it has really helped us to strengthen our communication and build mutual trust while navigating this turbulent early-stage. I would recommend this kind of coaching to all founders out there!
What do you consider the most critical components of effectively managing a game studio?
I think there are three key components for early-stage startup you need to focus on.
First, you really need to nail down your vision and mission – what you want to do and why it needs to be done. That’s your direction for the next few years. That’s your heading that you’ll anchor your decisions to.
The point is that no startup will absolutely know they’ll make it. But in order to have a chance to make it it’s important to have a clear direction that you will focus your time, energy and money into. If you do a little bit of this and a little bit of that you lose focus and momentum.
Secondly, you need a great team to execute that vision. I was lucky to get Jaakko and Ville to team up and start something awesome together. Working together in the past has really helped us to hit the ground running with Kokoon. I think we had our first multiplayer playable in less than two weeks after starting out.
Thirdly, being financially responsible is essential – especially for a start-up. Your budget is your lifeline. You really need to make your runway count. While raising your pre-seed you’ll already need to think about your next round and how to finance the time in-between. Grants, loans etc.
We are lucky enough to have leading angel investors supporting us on our journey that not only help us financially but are great strategic coaches to spar with.
What is your approach to building a team at Kokoon Games, and what key values do you prioritize when hiring new team members?
I’ve always been a firm believer in building your team around a unified culture. And the building blocks of a strong culture lie in your core values. In the best case they will steer your decisions, help recruiting the right people, set up ground rules for your MO etc. Awesome tool when your company is more mature.
But I’ve come to realize that an early-stage startup is like a baby reindeer. It’s just learning to walk, trying to figure out who they are and how they operate in this world.
So setting up values for your startup before you actually know what works for you can be a waste of valuable time and focus.
Let me open this up a bit.
We set our core values before starting development full time. And how were those values reflected in our day-to-day life? In no meaningful way. Some things that happened early on in our journey were even totally contradicting our values. Our ideal values weren’t the right values for us. So we ditched them.
So what are we doing then?
Instead of locking down a few ideal values we decided to start continuously reflecting on how we work together, how we want to work together and what feels natural and important to us.
Doing this consistently we have seen some key themes rising and from these themes we can start molding our values and core culture and ways of operating. One key thing at a time. I feel this is an optimal way for us to define our culture and processes to also better understand what are the key characteristics of future team members.
How does Kokoon Games plan to innovate in the party game genre?
We believe there’s a lot of room for innovation in the party game space. We wanted to focus on party games due to their social nature of bringing people together – friends and strangers.
We have these amazing classic premium party games like Super Smash Bros, Overcooked and Mario Party series – games that are extremely engaging and superb when played together in local play but don’t really convert players in long term retention. Why? We think for two main reasons: the games aren’t platform agnostic and they don’t transition into solo play in a meaningful way.
On the other hand you’ll find these very accessible, great online party games like Stumble Guys and Brawl Stars that are mainly played either solo or in online parties. They don’t, however, have the added organic boost from local-play. We think that’s the key to unlock the needed organic growth.
In a nutshell, we want to bring party games to the masses by developing highly engaging, highly accessible party games that are platform agnostic and that strongly incentivize local play while still having a smooth transition to solo-play progression. It’s an ambitious target but I know we can achieve it.
Could you walk us through the process of developing your game’s visual aesthetics and world-building concept and share the main inspirations that guided these creative decisions?
Creating a visual style for a cross-platform party game is an interesting synergy of simplicity and complexity. You need to develop a visual style that is very approachable (marketable) and easily readable (and accessible for e.g. non-gamers) but at the same time it needs to reflect the quality needs of console and PC players.
Same rules apply when designing various features to our game. Balancing this has been and will be challenging but really rewarding.
As they say – “simplicity is complexity resolved” and this is our motto when designing mechanics and visual aesthetics for our game.
What challenges do you anticipate, and how do you plan to overcome them as a new studio?
Obviously one big challenge is mobile UA at the moment. Every studio is thinking about how to tackle this. Our approach is relatively simple – organic growth. Playing with your friends in the same physical space by nature promotes organic growth.
It’s important that we design our game from the ground up to promote and facilitate local play. We can’t just stamp on “co-op features” but the whole game needs to make you want to go and hang out with your friends and play. Just like back in the day we took our Nintendo 64 controllers to our neighbors house to play some Mario Kart!
Secondly, creating game and monetization systems that tie up all platforms together will be a challenge. Mobile player expectations are different to those of PC and console players. We need to be able to facilitate this.
Also balancing the game’s visual fidelity with accessibility between mobile and PC/consoles is part of this challenge. In other words, having an art style that appeals to the masses without being overly “hyper casual” is important. Without going into details we have a pretty damn good idea how to tackle these.
Thirdly, building and developing your player community will be essential for us. How to utilize performance marketing to find the early adopters and then convert those players to your evangelists and content creators.
We are lucky to have the ex-Head of Community from Stumble Guys as our senior advisor to help us tackle this challenge.
Additionally, we also need to design the game as streamable as possible, to show how fun it is and get people on board easily! We need to design features that boost playing together and look visually engaging so you can show off cool stuff to other players who are not in your party.
What are your long-term goals for Kokoon Games as a studio?
We want to become the category leader of party games and really expand the user base of the genre in general. We want to introduce the party game experience to the masses and bring friends and strangers to the same space together to enjoy our game(s). This is central to our ethos.
We have interviewed a lot of our potential players and we know there are a lot of people searching for accessible, “triple-i quality” games that they could play with their friends and continue playing solo. We are here to answer this call.
Henri Lindgren
CEO & Co-Founder, Kokoon Games
