The Nordic Game Program has gotten a new lease of life as the Nordic Game Institute finds additional funds to extend the program past its original expiration date last year.
Officially the Nordic Game Support ran out of money last year. But in a surprise announcement, the Nordic Game Institute has announced that there will also be a round of funding this year, as they have found an additional million Danish Kroner in their existing budget. The million Danish kroner is to be handed out to five different projects in predetermined 200 000 DKK portions.
However, the new funding round also comes with a number of additional criteria for the applicants. The games applying for funding must be aimed at pre-schoolers, display a diversity in characters (differences in sex, ethnical background, sexual orientation etc), or have a clear foundation in Nordic cultural traditions.
Klaus Hansen
The Danish representative in the Nordic Game Institute, Klaus Hansen, explains that they were able to secure additional funds for the support program using funds that had been reserved for projects that never materialized.
Since we had some of our activities in the program, which had not gotten of the ground, the board of the NGI wanted to use those funds for a small additional round of funding in 2015.
Hansen says that the decision also makes good sense when seen as part of the plan to get the funding program extended to 2016 and beyond. “NGI is working to extend the Nordic game Program after it’s expiration in 2015 – so we thought is was inconvenient to have a ‘hole’ in the applications. And the Council of Nordic Ministers accepted this.”
Klaus Hansen explains that the new criteria was also introduced to curtail the number of applications for the program. “One million is very little – especially, when we are receiving between 160 and 185 applications per funding round. It would be very inconvenient to have all these developers working on applications when there’s so little chance for them to be chosen.”
The board of NGI has been in dialogue with the expert committee, who have been deciding which applications to accept during the programs life […] about what criteria we could apply to create a natural limit on the number of applications, so the number of applicants will be sensible when compared to the limited funds available.