The Policy Summit was held at Nordic Game on May 20, 2025. Three sessions took place over the course of a day rich in presentations, exchanges and debates. Here is a summary of the points that caught our attention.
The problem of visibility.
Several presentations and speeches highlighted the difficulty of making productions visible, drowned out by the mass of releases, with traditional editorial strategies performing less and less, and the advent of new ways of making a game public – search engines, social networks, search via AI.
This question of visibility is linked to the end of traditional publicity systems: the major weakening of the weight of specialized magazines and the massive increase in the role of influencers has changed the way we communicate. Added to this is the weight of user reviews, aggregated in metacritics – we analyzed the impact of review bombing.
The transition from search engine to AI is also a strategic point, as the various AIs feed off social networks, but also the way in which game descriptions are written – leaving studios and publishers little room for manoeuvre. Here too, the culture wars on social networks are not anecdotal and feed the AIs.
A growing public role for studios
The role of the various regional initiatives, notably the funds and incubators that are developing at a more or less advanced stage – see the European Audiovisual Observatory’s report on the subject – reflects an approach to video games in terms of a cultural product and therefore a creative work. The cultural policy of creation is not necessarily that of the supply of goods, because what’s missing is the date of marketing: how to make these games public, so that they find their audience.
Without taking the place of private publishers and platforms, it would be interesting to reflect on the modalities of publicization: from publication to communication, so that authors can find their players, and stabilize an independent ecosystem which, although very talented, is struggling to find a commercial balance.
Data: the big absentee
To achieve an efficient cultural offering strategy, market analysis seems necessary, and especially accessible, reliable data. To date, and in contrast to other cultural industries which are multiplying studies for the sector in order to rationalize investments, the video game world suffers from a lack of public data collection. This is somewhat paradoxical, given that the figures exist for mobile, console and PC platforms, but are not transmitted due to the lack of a collection system – often associated with a tax for other industries. The impact of this absence is to make the market difficult to understand for the various categories of financiers.
Transfers and effects
Conversations continued on new ways of looking at video games, whether as simulations or serious games. There was even a debate on the latter term, which should be abandoned in favor of “applied games”. Research projects, from education to industry, are important points in the transition from entertainment video games to application video games. It’s also an opportunity to transfer video game techniques to other industries. Real-time 3D engines are changing the face of training, simulation and animation.
The gamification of the 2010s had imported behavioral design techniques, and this point was touched upon in connection with dark patterns, the implicit techniques that encourage people to spend money. These remain a major issue for consumer confidence and the protection of the youngest and most fragile members of society. This floating point, coupled with the outcry we’re seeing in Europe against screens for under-15s, is a time bomb for the industry.
Latest European data
The summit, hosted by Nordic Games, was rounded off by a preview of the European Commission’s bi-annual study. Providing a panorama of video game practices, it offers some very interesting figures:
279.8 million Europeans are gamers (or 75%), 53% of whom play every week; mobile dominates (192m), followed by console (132m) and PC (126m). As for non-gamers: a third haven’t even had the idea of playing.
in terms of skills, Europe and the UK are neck and neck, ahead of the USA
US investment in gaming between 2020 and 2024 will reach 12.2 billion, compared with 3.6 billion for Europe, 1.8 billion for the UK, 1.06 billion for South Korea and 0.28 billion for Japan.
The video game market is in a state of upheaval, and the independent ecosystem, which is largely present in Malmö, is affected, whether in terms of orders, services or meetings with publishers, making the role of public support policies decisive in tumultuous times.
Nordic Game’s Games Policy Summit website: