The Development of the Swedish Game Industry - The Video Game Industry: Formation, Present State, and Future - page 126

are not among the core group or not viewed as core competence within the
company and therefore will be cut fi rst. New companies tend to have a very
few women employed, if any at all. There seems to be a horizontal segrega-
tion within the industry and many of female employees work outside pro-
duction, with support functions like fi nance or public relations (Sandqvist
2010, 215).
The big changes within the industry, between 2001 and 2003, also came
through some major acquisitions and reconstructions. Starbreeze had got-
ten into fi nancial problems after losing their fi rst developing contract and
O3 Games, another Swedish developer, bought Starbreeze and merged the
two companies. The new company developed a few games, but continued to
have problems with publishers cancelling projects. After the game Enclave
was released in 2002 the German publisher Swift went bankrupt and Star-
breeze had to lay of staf .
The problems that Starbreeze faced also had other ef ects within the
industry. Starbreeze had entered a contract to buy the Swedish company
Rock Solid, but broke the agreement and Rock Solid was forced into bank-
ruptcy. A settlement was later negotiated between Starbreeze and the pro-
prietors of Rock Solid (Starbreeze 2004). The owners of Rock Solid later
started up Avalanche Studios, which came to develop the Just Cause series
and became one of the largest developing studios in Sweden.
Starbreeze also sold parts of the company. Starbreeze slimmed down
the organization by reducing the animation and motion capture depart-
ment. This part of the company was sold to the British company Centroid
(Starbreeze 2005). The new specialized studio has since worked with many
of the larger game productions with motion capture and animations, tech-
nologies that most Swedish companies no longer keep internally.
The success for Starbreeze came with The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape
from Butcher Bay for Xbox in 2004. The game was critically acclaimed but
was not the economic success it could have been. The Xbox console had a lim-
ited dif usion and the PlayStation 2 version of the game had been cancelled.
The game was highly innovative and was one of the fi rst games that used
normal mapping, a technique that can output highly detailed environments
while reducing the number of necessary polygons. The technique opened up
an advancement in game graphics and became a widely used standard. Sup-
port for normal mapping is built into modern game consoles.
During this period, the older company Atod was thrown into a spiral of
acquisitions by foreign publishers. First Atod was merged with the British
company Warthog, who bought the company in 2002. It later became Giz-
mondo Sweden, and after fi nancial dii culties it ended up as a part of the Brit-
ish publisher Eidos Interactive in 2006, after which it became Eidos Studios
Sweden. Another large acquisition was the French publisher Vivendi Univer-
sal, who bought strategy game developer Massive Entertainment in 2002.
The most dramatic acquisition was of the largest Swedish company DICE.
The company had released the success game Battlefi eld 1942 in 2002. The