Start-up: Games-Entrepreneurs 2024 Supports Nine Indie Studios

In 2024, Start-up: Games-Entrepreneurs is supporting a total of 16 founders to realise their vision of an indie games studio. The teams accepted into the programme are Achtung Autobahn, gypynkt Games, Headkino, Jalil Daif, No foolin' Games, Nukuna Interactive, Shit Show Studios, Sunbeam Games and The Roof Interactive.

Nine aspiring game companies kicked off the "Start-up: Games Entrepreneurs" programme with a two-day workshop at the premises of the Stiftung Digitale Spielkultur (Digital Games Culture Foundation). The 16 participants were selected in June by a jury of six experts, including Valentina Birke (Super Crowd Entertainment), Johanna Janiszewski (Tiny Crocodile Studios), Jörg Luibl (GEE Magazin), Lorenzo Pilia (Saftladen Collective / BerlinGameScene.com), Mai-Vy Thach (Ubisoft) and Thorsten S. Wiedemann (A MAZE.). The programme teaches individuals and teams of up to five people the basics of setting up a business in the games industry. Start-up: Games-Entrepreneurs is organised and run by the Stiftung Digitale Spielkultur and is funded by the Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg.

At the kick-off event on 16 July, Johannes Knop from Randwerk and Jonas Jacobsen from Deep Sky Games shared their own start-up experiences and gave an insight into the specifics of a registered cooperative. The following day, Mafalda Duarte, Studio Director of Telescope Games, led a workshop on sustainable networking. After a trip to gamescom in August, the teams can look forward to a multi-month programme of workshops and mentoring sessions starting in September.

"Regular start-up advice provides an insight into the basics of business management, but it cannot reflect the specifics and peculiarities of the games industry. The importance and necessity of the 'Start-up: Games Entrepreneurs' programme is demonstrated by the large number of diverse and exciting applications, from which it was not easy to select a few," said jury member Johanna Janiszewski, founder of Tiny Crocodile Studios and member of the advisory board of the Stiftung Digitale Spielkultur. "I am particularly pleased for the future of our industry that our group of founders is very diverse in terms of gender and biographical background."

Start-up: Games-Entrepreneurs was launched as a pilot project in 2022 with the aim of providing creatives from the games sector with practical knowledge for their own founding process with the help of industry experts. It has already established itself as a point of contact for indie studio founders in Berlin and Brandenburg.

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