“Minecraft”, “Valheim” and “Raft”, to name just a few: Small or even one-man teams from Sweden have created more video game hits than you would expect from a small country.
“It’s the cold weather — you sit inside, you play, you have nothing to do outside,” mused Philip Westre, who co-founded small game developer Landfall, when asked to explain the success of Sweden’s gaming industry. .
Housed in a villa in a sleepy suburb west of Stockholm, the studio — which has about 10 employees — just had a surprise of its own.
The walls of the small corner office are decorated with artwork inspired by Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki, framed old game covers and a shelf of plush toys.
In keeping with their tradition of new releases on April 1st, they recently published their latest game: “Content Warning”.
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The aim of the silly multiplayer game is to film your friends being scared and upload the videos to the fictional social media platform SpookTube — hoping they go viral.
To help get the ball rolling, Landfall decided the game would be free for one day, but didn’t invest in any advertising.
To the company’s surprise, over six million people jumped on the offer in the first 24 hours.
Developer Zorro Svardendahl said one of the company’s goals was to beat the previous record for the number of people playing simultaneously on the Steam gaming platform.
Known as concurrent players, the metric is commonly used in the industry to gauge a game’s popularity. Landfall’s previous record was 29,000.
“On the second day, I think we reached 200,000… which is pretty wild,” Svardendahl told AFP.
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Moving fast
“Content Warning” is just the latest example of small Swedish groups becoming hugely successful.
In early 2021, the Viking-themed “Valheim” — created by a team of five — was released by Iron Gate studio and quickly found a global audience, selling over 12 million copies.
Another hit, “Raft” — where players are tasked with surviving on a raft floating in the ocean — was created by three students attending Uppsala University.
The most famous example is of course “Minecraft”, which was first developed by one person: Markus “Notch” Persson.
Since its initial release on May 17, 2009, “Minecraft” has become the best-selling video game in history, with Mojang announcing in 2023 that it had surpassed 300 million sales.
“I think small teams can work and move very quickly,” Svardendahl said.
Decisions can be made by individuals based on what feels right, rather than having to negotiate approvals through layered corporate bureaucracy, he explained.
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Svardendahl believes that the more nimble approach of a smaller team was key to the success of “Content Warning,” which was developed in just six weeks.
But some of Sweden’s game developers have grown into major studios with hundreds of employees, such as DICE — creators of the “Battlefield” series — and Massive Entertainment — currently developing the upcoming “Star Wars Outlaws.”
The Nordic country is also home to video game giant Embracer, which controls a host of studios and owns the “Tomb Raider” franchise.
Despite a population of just 10.5 million people, Swedish games have been downloaded seven billion times, according to the Swedish Game Industry, which estimates that one in four people in the world has played a game made in Sweden.
In 2022, the country’s game developers had a total revenue of 32.5 billion kroner ($3 billion).
Per Stromback, president of the Swedish Game Industry, said several factors explain the country’s success in gaming.
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It has a number of quality schools that train a skilled workforce, as well as a culture that favors teamwork.
‘Self-fulfilling prophecy’
In addition, Sweden’s small size meant that developers sought an international audience early on.
“We now also have several decades of tradition in the industry,” Stromback told AFP.
The first seeds of the Swedish scene can be found in the “nerd culture” of the 1980s, he said.
Pioneers learned programming on Commodore 64 computers, while learning game mechanics from role-playing games.
“Nobody realized at the time that it would become a billion-dollar industry,” Stromback said.
At Landfall, Westre pointed out that the Swedes are big players themselves.
“The gaming culture is very, very strong here, both in gaming and in development,” he said.
Svardendahl added that the culture had started to feed on itself, with younger developers taking inspiration from their predecessors.
As a “really big Minecraft fan,” he was thrilled to learn that the game had been developed in his home country.
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“It’s a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because I knew people were making games in Sweden, I knew I could make games in Sweden.”
Source: AFP