Kanaliiga reaches out to players across industries

Ville, Jani and Emma play Kanaliiga in their workplace teams

HS Vision will report in the summer of 2024 how employees in the IT fields measure each other on Kanaliiga’s servers. The IT industry is the largest single professional group employing Kanaliiga players, although the entire IT industry as a concept is already huge and multidimensional in itself. The industry is highlighted in video gaming because it is relatively young and the employees and entrepreneurs are often very into video games - a coder who has never played video games is an extremely rare case. At the same time, internal work networking is also admirable in the IT sector, and other sectors could also learn from it.

In addition to the IT sector, players from numerous other fields also play in Kanaliiga. In the banking and financial sector, for example, Osuuspankki has several teams in the PUBG and Counter Strike games. There is also a wide range of tasks for the Kanaliiga players - in OP’s PUBG team, in addition to more traditional banking tasks, Ville is the coach of Corporate Customer Service, who in his work coaches and trains employees on various topics and also performs quality control. The road to the PUBG team opened up at a typical Finnish networking event, i.e. the workplace Christmas party in 2020.

“My colleague z1nkje talked about PUBG and Kanaliiga at Christmas. I hinted that it would be great to be able to play Kanaliiga, and he was able to advise me on the right Discord channel, where I met other OP players and could join in playing. Since the spring of 2021, I have been playing Kanaliiga.”

In terms of Kanaliiga, the same challenge seems to be plaguing jobs from season to season - how would the players find each other inside the jobs? Osuuspanki has a hobby channel in the workplace’s own communication tools, where you could find a hobby club for, for example, video games or other hobbies. However, not everyone necessarily reads hobby channels or the message only reaches their own close circle.

“Searching for players is the most difficult, because naturally not everyone follows all the communication channels where we are looking for players. When the players found/found each other, it was easy to form teams. Currently, there are three teams in both PUBG and CS2, and according to my information, there would be players interested in both games up to a fourth team.”

Almost without exception, playing in the Kanaliiga has increased the players’ well-being and contacts within the workplace. You can also often find like-minded people playing video games, which naturally brings work communities closer together. According to Ville, this has also happened at OP - just as employees put on sweatpants for a floorball session, they can also sit down to play video games and bond with other co-workers.

Fermion Oulu’s PUBG team represents a rarity in Kanaliiga to the extent that Fermion Oy is a subsidiary of Orion Oy, which specializes specifically in the manufacture of pharmaceuticals. Jani, or more familiarly called Janimake, works as a warehouse worker and dispatcher at Fermion Oulu.

“My main task is to prepare the so-called “picks” for importation, that is, I put the necessary raw materials on the pallet(s) so that our production runs smoothly 24/7. This task also includes reweighing the raw materials, which is an important and very precise job, so that the process succeeds exactly as it should and according to precisely defined instructions.”

The team for Kanaliiga was found in Fermion’s work group - partly by chance. Janimake’s co-worker had seen him playing PUBG on his stream and brought up the game at work. Soon, others started to be found at the workplace who had spent their time working on the game in their free time, and the team was formed. Nowadays, challenges for game days are mostly caused by the players’ shift work, but to quote Janimake, “we always have a team on hand”. The players are also played evenly within the framework of the work shifts.

_“I really feel that playing e-sports has affected the relationships within the workplace. Although we have had good relations depending on the department, this has also brought the work team closer and closer together and only in a positive sense. Our team has participants from every department, regardless of whether it is an employee, a white-collar worker or a senior white-collar worker. In addition, I have also noticed to my delight that people who are not in the team or have anything to do with PUBG are have watched our games and have come to chat with the players and otherwise discussed with each other how the “Oulu team” had done that week, even though there are no other Fermion or Orion teams involved.

The Fermion Oulu players have also gotten to know and become closer through playing with the players of another Oulu PUBG team. AreSports has been playing Kanaliiga for a long time, but as the newest newcomer to the PUBG side, the AreSports Oulu team was born, which, as the name suggests, is made up of employees from Oulu.

Are is responsible for facility property maintenance in numerous locations, and the Oulu team includes long-term installers. Aarolla aka. “Abenabe” is 45 and Timo or “Timildo_” is 40 years old, so at least there is no shortage of life experience in the team. AreSports Oulu’s team is largely formed in such a way that the team’s captain Santtu decided to put together another team for Are in order to be able to play the Kanaliiga every week when the previous team was already full and Santu mostly filled the role of a substitute player.

The market leader in Finnish retail, S group, or SOK, also has a PUBG team in the Kanaliiga - according to rumors, a territorial takeover on the CS side is also in the works. Although the S group employs a considerable number of professionals in various fields in Finland, it is once again difficult for employees to find each other among the huge number of professionals.

Emma, ​​who is better known in the gaming community as EMS or HeyEMS, had gotten to know Kanaliiga through her spouse, who played in the league, albeit under a different company. On the Kanaliiga’s Discord server, he ended up playing the so-called mixes, i.e. PUBG with teams formed with people who are more or less familiar to each other. In Mixaille, he learned that his employer SOK also has its own team in the Kanaliiga, with which he sent a message to the team’s captain and thus ended up in the team’s composition. Originally, the team members found each other through SOK’s Facebook pages, where the Kanaliiga is announced from time to time.

“I’m a shift manager in a restaurant, which means I sell a lot of drinks and have nice chats with the customers. Quite traditional restaurant work - the exception to many other restaurants is that we mainly work alone. We’re all-round planers, waiters, cooks, movers, therapists and whatever the situation calls for! As a shift manager, the job also includes orders, invincibles, event planning and social media/advertising, of course sales promotion and taking care of customer satisfaction.”

SOK’s team consists of employees from all over Finland, and the players include everything from salespeople to white-collar workers. Playing in the Kanaliiga at one’s workplaces has not made groups so strong, but has made it possible to get to know different employees of the same employer all over Finland. Maybe in the future it will also be easier to find players through official communication channels!