Finnish devs had 4 of the top 10 highest-grossing iOS apps..a few years back and this is no coincidence. Henri Holm was a big part of Rovio's massive success in capturing top spots with Angry Birds and other released game titles.
A bit of background on Finland's strong recent history:
Rovios Angry Birds took flight in early 2010, racked up billions of downloads and became the first true brand partnership behemoth - Star Wars, NASA, Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and others flocking to the franchise.
In the summer of 2012, Supercell shocked the nascent mobile games industry by aggressively attacking the potential of the iPad games market by launching Hay Day and Clash of Clans within weeks of each other, yielding two multi-billion dollar games that would still be able to pop into US iOS top three grossing chart nearly six years later. Boom Beach also take off.
Just few months later in Oulu, a thousand miles north of Helsinki gaming nexus, scrappy yokel start-up Fingersoft spun gold out of gravity-based rally game Hill Climb Racing, which would go on to become a rare billion downloads monster in the Android apps market.
Across the Baltic Sea, a Swedish team had created a dazzling puzzle game monetisation formula - the long and terrible reign of Candy Crush Saga begun. By 2014, US iPhone top 10 sales chart routinely featured four to five games built in Helsinki/Stockholm studios.
Finland mobile developers, strategists, and business developers have shown their capacity and skills repeatedly for creating games that hit the $1 billion in annual sales or two billion download mark in a couple of years. Finland has been touted as the global center of mobile gaming for some time now as a result.
By 2016, Finland had 250 games companies and the industry represented 0.5 per cent of the GDP. Finnish companies generated seven per cent of global mobile games revenue - a massive portion for a nation of six million.
Henri's experience will bode very well for FDM and 2019 is going to be epic.