Happy Accidents: How We Found Our Reason to Play

Northern Game Summit

A few weeks ago I was invited to speak at the Northern Game Summit in Kajaani. The event is a yearly conference for game industry professionals, first held in 2012. It gathers developers, designers, artists and business people: indie developers, students and established companies like Remedy and Rovio. NGS is organized by Kajaani University of Applied Sciences. They wanted someone from inside esports to talk.

At first I almost said no. Speaking English on stage to a big audience sounded like a disaster waiting to happen for a socially awkward, not-too-fluent guy like me. Also, I was not sure I had anything worth listening to say.  ROUNDS never followed a strict plan. We have kind of lived by a certain unwritten playbook. The people who joined ROUNDS have learned it by doing, everyone bringing something to it too. What that playbook actually is has been a mystery. 

Preparing the talk gave the keys to unlock it. The title for the speech was: “Happy Accidents: How Unexpected Ideas Change the Game”. The speech was story of ROUNDS. You can view the slides of the speech here (NGS 2025 speech, PDF). Give a call or message me, if you would like to chat about it. 

The Story, Real Quick

ROUNDS started as a family project a little less than five years ago. Our two sons played CS:GO competitively. It started to affect our daily life, no moments together, family dinners turned into flashmobs,  schoolwork being disturbed by nightly CS-sessions which I often ended in a not-so-constructive manner.  We as a family had to make a decision. Do we try to put a stop to it, or do we try to understand what they really are doing and find a better way to live with it?

Obviously we wanted to understand esports and support our boys. We also wanted to improve how our whole family worked together. We started an esports org as a research project under my company Radiant Bytes Oy. We studied, tested and learned by doing. Over time that project grew. In 2023 ROUNDS became its own company.

We made many mistakes. Some ideas worked, some failed. When I prepared my talk for Kajaani, I started to see patterns. ROUNDS had grown through moments that at first looked accidental. But when I looked deeper, it felt like these moments were not accidents at all. They were the result of catalysis. Small reactions that happened when people, ideas and timing met.  Even in the chaos, there has been a kind of process that manages what is left behind.

On the drive back from Kajaani to Tampere it sunk in. We experiment, we learn and  keep going.

 

We could have probably tried to find our way of doing  faster and through a more organized process. The way we did it ensured that it is what we are, and not something brought artificially from outside.

PLAY. BUILD. IMPACT.

I drove back from Kajaani through smaller roads and had lots of time to think. Simple questions, like why do we exist? What is the point of all this?   I can assure you, the process and the route home had as many turns and twists as the road from Kajaani.

Similarly to that drive, it finally ended up somewhere. We can now  describe the purpose of ROUNDS in three words.

We didn’t plan it in 2021. We collaborate with the gaming culture in these three ways. PLAY.  BUILD. IMPACT. This is our reason to exist.

Jussi – dev0
CEO, ROUNDS