Earlier this year, Rovio Entertainment’s head of games, Jami Laes, left the Angry Birds studio to pursue other projects, and now Laes is launching a new mobile game studio in Finland called Futureplay Games.

“Mobile games are doing better than ever in the past 15 years that I’ve been in the industry, but the future looks even brighter with aggressive growth from mobile video ads,” Laes said in a statement. “Ads are providing clever new ways to enhance the experience for players and to develop engaging and successful games that attract a large and happy audience.”

In addition to Laes, the Futureplay team is made up of other industry veterans, including Kai Auvinen, formerly the Art Director at Digital Chocolate and, more recently, VP Games & Executive Producer at Remedy Entertainment; Mika Rahko, a programmer of several Angry Birds titles at Rovio; Arttu Mäki, a former Team Fortress 2 dev and head of level designing at Rovio; and Tuomas Huhtanen, a 10-year back-end and client software development veteran.

“We are confident the veteran team we’ve assembled at Futureplay Games will be key in driving a new era of mobile games that take these exciting opportunities to the next level and create a new category of gaming,” Laes said.

“View to play” gaming

Futureplay will focus on a business model Laes calls “view to play” gaming, which the studio defines as “a natural integration of broadly accessible gameplay and ad-based monetization.”

In other words, Futureplay will make free to play games that are supported by advertising alone rather than also microtransactions, as most free to play mobile games do. The studios website says that “both [F2P and ads] done right can be great.”

Laes explained, “We believe in view-to-play gaming for a simple reason – it’s faster, cheaper and more fun to watch an ad than pay for an in-app purchase. I look forward to sharing more details about our company and first games in the coming months.”

Image via Futureplay Games | Facebook