Minecraft, Raft, now Content Warning: why are Sweden’s indie game studios so successful? Insiders have a few ideas
- Sweden’s gaming industry seems more successful than most, to judge by the number of hit video games it has produced
- Swedish games have been downloaded seven billion times, and some of the biggest were developed by small teams. Insiders break down their success
Minecraft, Valheim and Raft, just to name a few: small or even one-man teams from Sweden have produced more video game hits than one would expect from a small country.
“It’s the cold weather – you sit inside, you game, you don’t really have anything to do outside,” says Philip Westre, who co-founded the 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 around 10 employees – has just had a surprise hit of its own.
In line with their tradition of new releases on April 1, they recently published their latest game: Content Warning.
The object of the goofy multiplayer romp is to film your friends being scared and upload the videos to the imagined social media platform SpookTube – hoping for them to go viral.