Teemu Haila has long been a familiar face in Finland’s gaming industry. As a teenager, he built some of the country’s first online gaming communities and established supporting charities. He joined Wooga in 2010 and co-founded Playraven in 2012. After Playraven’s 2019 acquisition by Rovio, Teemu co-founded Metaplay to address a common challenge for game developers – scalable and customisable backend tech. His 18+ years advancing the industry were recognised by IGDA with the 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award.
What does it actually mean to build for scale? In this talk, Teemu breaks down what happens after global launch and what it really takes to grow a live game from 10,000 players to 100 million. He introduces the Four Pillars of Scaling – the core foundations teams must set early if they expect global reach, not just regional success. Drawing on Metaplay’s experience building a server-authoritative backend-for-Unity trusted by fast-growing studios, he cuts the fluff and focuses on hard lessons: architecture, live ops discipline, team maturity, and avoiding the traps that punish late preparation.