The Development of the Swedish Game Industry - The Video Game Industry: Formation, Present State, and Future - page 125

known in Sweden and had become the fi rst publicly traded company in the
Nordic countries (Daydream 1997).
The Swedish game development industry has never generated any large
profi ts, but during the millennium shift the losses became alarmingly high.
Looking at the return on equity in Figure 7.1, the problem within the game
industry becomes clear: the return rates are strongly negative. The years
before and after the IT bubble burst, the industry was bleeding money and
the result was particularly low between 1997 and 2003. During this period
a lot of money was invested into game projects that never yielded any profi t.
Subsequently tens of millions of euros had to be poured into the companies
to cover the losses.
The industry went through a transformations phase after 2001. This
phase can also be seen in the number of employees working within the
industry ( Figure 7.2). There was a decline in the number of employees 2002
and 2003, when around 22 per cent of the workforce disappeared from
the industry. The industry went from close to six hundred people in 2001
to 450 in 2003. The reason for this was not only that a couple of the larg-
est companies went out of business, but also that a number of companies
downsized during these years.
Even through the fast industry expansion, the percentage of women
working at game developing companies has been low and even declining.
There had always been signifi cantly more men than women in the industry,
but the gender distribution got even worse during the years with decline
( Figure 7.2). During the transformation period the share fell even more,
down to around 7 per cent in 2002 and 2003. This indicates that women

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Figure 7.2 Total workforce and proportion of Women within the Swedish game
industry, 1992-2009 . Source: Data compiled from the annual reports of all Swedish
game developing stock companies.