The Development of the Swedish Game Industry - The Video Game Industry: Formation, Present State, and Future - page 128

largest and most successful is Coldwood Interactive. Coldwood developed
mostly sport games and is probably best known for The Fight—Lights Out
from 2010 , one of the release titles for the PlayStation Move controllers.
The rapid technological progress was responsible for parts of this devel-
opment and opened up whole new markets and possibilities. Swedish stu-
dios had up until the 2000s mostly focused on PC games, and only a few
created console games. PC development was a free and an open technology
that did not require any license, but the downside is a much smaller mar-
ket (DTI 2002). In recent years the larger companies have focused more
on console games, but the largest change has come from the development
in handheld gaming. Many of the companies established in recent years
are oriented towards the development of games for mobile platforms and
smaller downloadable games. The rapid development towards standardiza-
tion within hardware, software and distribution seems to have attracted
many new developers. The Apple iPhone, IOS operating system and App
Store are prime examples of this new mobile infrastructure. Digital dis-
tribution in general seems to have helped developers by circumventing the
distributions functions that publishers traditionally have.
To some degree, the new Swedish companies share similarities with prior
game developers—they are most often composed of young men with excep-
tional computers skills—but in other ways they are more heterogeneous.
They have, for example, very dif erent strategies regarding fi rm structure
and the fi nancing of their projects. Some of these developers have been
successful and are well known within the game community. A handful of
Swedish indie developers have competed at and won the annual competi-
tion at the Independent Game Festival (IGF).
Best known and most successful is the company Mojang and its creator
Markus Persson (aka Notch) with the acclaimed game Minecraft . The
game has to date sold four million copies, making it one of the best-selling
Swedish games ever. 6 The game is limited in graphical scope but excels in
the open, inviting and creative sandbox gameplay. Mojang distributed the
game and went outside the conventional distributions channels and tra-
ditional marketing. The company also used an unconventional fi nancing
method by making the game available for purchase during the develop-
ment phase.
Another successful small-scale developer is Frictional Games, focus-
ing on downloadable PC games that are somewhat more limited in scope
compared to big-budget titles. Frictional Games made the game Amnesia .
The game won awards at the IGF and was partly fi nanced by grants from
the Nordic council (a council formed in 1952 with elected members from
Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, the Faroe Islands, Green-
land and Åland). The Nordic countries support a couple of developers each
year with grants, but the total amount is relatively small—annually around
eight hundred thousand euros. 7 Another of the Swedish IGF winners is Erik
Svedäng, who won in 2009 with the PC game Blueberry Garden . He has