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was formed when individuals from the demogroup Triton got a contract to
develop a 3-D fantasy game called
Sorcery
. Like most Swedish developers,
the company was focused on the PC market and developed their own game
engine. The fairly inexperienced development team had a very high level
of technological expertise, but nevertheless experienced problems fi nishing
the programming of the game. In 2000 the French publisher Infogrames
bought the British publisher Gremlin Interactive and decided to terminate
the game contract. The game was far from being fi nished and no new pub-
lisher took over the contract. The loss of the contract seriously threatened
the continued existence of the fi rm (Sandqvist 2010, 170). Not only Star-
breeze, but also the industry as a whole was about to change.
THE TRANSFORMATION, 2001-2005
In the early 2000s the game industry was hit by the general decline in the
ICT-sector after the dot-com bubble burst. An increasing amount of game
studios disappeared or were reconstructed. From 2003, the number of com-
panies in the game developing industry became unstable.
The most spectacular change was that two of the largest and most infl u-
ential companies at the time, Daydream and Unique Development Studios
(UDS), closed down in 2002. The two companies had been bought by ven-
ture capitalists. When the game companies did not show any profi t the
owners fi led for bankruptcy. UDS was at the time the largest developer in
Sweden and had over seventy-fi ve employees, which was about 14 per cent
of the total workforce. Daydream was a smaller company but was well
40,00
20,00
0,00
— \
—
i-»
ISJ
NJ
NJ
ISJ
A
->^VhJ
^^^^T
ro
ID 1 U)
ID
UD
O
O
O
O
/ O
TO""^
O
O
O
O
(D
I
U)
UD
ID
O
O
O
O / O
O
O
O
O
O
-20,00
-40,00
-60,00
80,00
Source: Data compiled from the annual reports of all Swedish game developing
stock companies.
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