Getting funding is hard

When you look for funding there are all kinds of funds out there that want to support different purposes, different events, products and ideas. But when it comes to games? It's a very hard thing to find funding for! Even before the great "Gamepocalypse" of mid-2022 and still ongoing today where we are seeing an unpredecented amount of layoffs in the games industry and investors pulling out of funding options, it was tough to find money. In Denmark specifically your best options were:

• Det Danske Filminstitut - Called DFI for short, an institution who was put in the world to promote and further movies and shows as a Danish cultural artefact. It has had great success throwing money after movies and shows from Denmark that lead to us being put on the map. A while ago they were also put in charge of giving money to games projects. It was a bit awkward because DFI had nothing to do with games but games were a kind of media so DFI was the best Denmark could really do.
• CapNova - A once go-to option for hard cash investment. Cap Nova wanted a return on their investment within a reasonable timeframe but didn't care much to be involved in the process. But in 2018 they sadly pulled out of Game Investments altogether and no one stepped in to fill the gap since. It was felt throughout the games business in Denmark and many feared this would be a great loss for new games and innovation and those worries were right. Companies like Ghost Ship Games came out of investors like CapNova so a great loss of potential there.
• InnoFounder - A great path if you have some general projects that can provide value to society, patents or otherwise technologies that can be licensed. You make an application and should you be chosen then InnoFounder will pay you (and up to two other co-founders) a salary for a year while you work on your project and also provide mentorship. The problem? They didn't really accept games for the longest time and is only more recently they started doing that but also you need to come at it from a specific angle to be considered so that your project isn't the game itself but an underlying technology that happens to support your game, so far from ideal.
• Miscellaneous - There are other smaller funds as well out there but a lot of them don't directly support games (the game would need to be secondary or tertiary) and some funds are so niche that applying with a game, while technically falling within a certain definition, would be very narrow and not really a game you'd want to make anyway.

What does the landscape look like today in 2025 though?

NIMBI

CapNova is gone, DFI no longer gives funding for games and InnoFounder is risky at best. So what then? Enter NIMBI the Danish Governments response to "What do we do about games?". This government funded and run institution has been signed into Danish Law which means that the next two years NIMBI is part of the official agenda. Their stated mission is to help fund games and product cultural artefacts same as DFI does with Movies and Show. And that's because NIMBI took over for DFI to give money to games. Isn't that neat? Well, the reality of it is not as good as one could hope.

NIMBI just had their first round of applications for game development. You can read about the things you can apply for here. It's currently just a carbon copy of what DFI used to do, but NIMBI is also new and haven't had a chance to do revisions or change the process. That might happen for the next round in Fall 2025. One can always hope. The different schemes they do support are:

• Development Support of up to 100.000 DKK - This is for developing a prototype mostly and to go from idea to something playable. This is just to see if the concept even works.
• Development Support for over 100.000 DKK - This is for developing a demo or vertical slice. The requirements here specify that you must make a playable demo which can resemble the expected type of game you'll get after full development and would be a great demo to go get publishing deals or investments.
• Support for Production - This grant is specifically for finalising and releasing the game. It is a requirement that a demo exists before one can apply for this type of grant and that the game is released with a Danish localization.
• Support for Promotion - This grant is specifically for events and activities that promotes the game you made. It is specified that you must have gotten a production grant from NIMBI before to apply for this type of grant.

And yes you read that right. It's a Grant. Not an investment and not a loan. NIMBI does not expect to see any return on investment. They expect to see a finished game that can be put in the world and further Danish games as a whole. Of course, NIMBI has to consider carefully what games they fund as they wish to see games come to fruitition but this prioritization means that games that don't have commercial value but have great cultural value could still be seriously considered over more traditional investment sources.

That all sounds great right? So what's the catch?

The Catch

NIMBI is a great opportunity and Spilordningen (the name of the grant) has put many games into this world previously via DFI. However there are quite a few problems:

• Pool Size - The amount of money that is available. They only get a certain amount of money to give out for games and every couple of years the pool is up for review to see if they should get more. This time around NIMBI got 106 applications which is a big step-up from last time they got applications but accepted only 17 applications. Those are not great odds. The good news it that supposedly a majority of applications that were accepted this year were new projects, rather than returning projects (yes you can get money more than once from NIMBI). Hopefully seeing so many applications will urge politicians to inject more money into NIMBI but it would be years from now before we see a result from that.
• NIMBI Staff - NIMBI employs very few people to do the work that is required to look over a lot of applications and to have a varied view on what could or could not succeed. This isn't to say that the people at NIMBI are not being as fair as they can or don't possess a lot of knowledge to pass judgement. There is no doubt that they try. However with a small pool of people looking over the work and a small pool of developers in Denmark, it's hard to not start running into conflicts of interest very fast that can't be solved when you only have few hands. On top of that the gaming industry always evolves and new types of games come out that people at NIMBI might never have heard of, understand or relate to. This could hinder funding for more innovative, niche or less conventional projects.
• Payout - Even if you get the money from NIMBI you can only get up to 60% of what you applied for. The other 40% has to come from other sources. So if you applied for 300,000 DKK you can only get 180,000 paid out. The 120,000 will have to come from some other source. This puts a big damper on how you actually plan out your budget unless you can somehow find money somewhere else which, as said earlier, is already sparse. On top of that taxation and whatnot makes this even more of an unattractive deal. There have been cases, far as I have been told, where NIMBI might wanna fund more than the 60%, however that's on a very case by case basis and not something you can rely on.
• Remnants of Pidgeonholing - Historically Spilordningen have most often been funding games that followed the Actantian Model which pidgeonholed what type of games you made quite severely. It has gotten better with time but there is seemingly still a tendency to not fund smaller and more focused experiences in favour of bigger games. A game I was seeking funding for back in 2020 via DFI was rejected on the basis that they thought the main mechanic couldn't carry a full game, but more a mini-game. Now a couple of years later the market is full of games that are driven by smaller mechanics because the play sessions are shorter.

So while I pray that NIMBI will be the saviour we desperately need so we can compete with Sweden and their thriving game scene it will be rough for a while longer before things get better. One other option exists that you could consider, but it's not specific to Denmark.

Creative Europe

Creative Europe is a big European entity which spends millions of euros on cultural and media projects. The demand for that fund would be a lot bigger than the ones available in most of Scandinavia, relatively speaking, however the competition would also be greater to match. There is also a lot more bureaucracy attached to this fund and is usually paid via milestone development. I have had some experience with this myself during my time at Bolverk Games. However Creative Europe is the kind of fund that could fund your entire development.

One thing to keep in mind though; Creative Europe expects that you already put a game out with some of the people you are going to apply with. This isn't as hard of a requirement as it sounds. Making a small game together and putting it out on itch.io or Steam even for free can still qualify you. On top of that you also most have a registered company in Denmark already (which means being incorprated and having a CVR number) and it must be approved by Creative Europe so that they give you an identification number that you use for your applications. So be aware that this isn't a short process (it will take months) and only once you have that can you actually attempt to apply for Creative Europe funding.

Conclusion

You need to keep your head up and keep trying if you wanna succeed in games. My advice would be to not quit your dayjob just yet. Make games on the side until you have something fun to release and see how it goes. If you don't care much for that just do it as a hobby and enjoy the process. There are likely other options I'm not aware of out there. I'd love to hear more about them. So hit me up on any of my channels and let me know what you've heard of :-)