Stockholm (AFP)

Country of ABBA, Ikea, Volvo ... and video games.

In Sweden, the sector has become the first cultural export product thanks to a series of global successes such as Candy Crush, Minecraft or in recent weeks the surprising Valheim.

A flourishing sector

While American and Japanese companies dominate the global video game scene, the Nordic country of just over 10 million people can boast an impressive industry.

According to its annual report, game publishers achieved in 2019 an annual turnover of more than 2.3 billion euros, twenty times more than a decade earlier.

The number of companies in the sector in Sweden has doubled since 2014, reaching 435 in 2019, with more than 9,000 employees.

And the trend has been reinforced by the Covid.

Among the biggest Swedish names in the sector: King, creator of the ultra popular mobile game Candy Crush, Mojang, developer of Minecraft and the publisher Embracer Group.

In February, the latter saw its market share exceed that of French Ubisoft after the takeover of developer Gearbox (Borderlands), thus becoming the most important video game company in Europe.

Several successful studios, originally Swedish, have also been bought by American behemoths, such as Electronic Arts, which in 2006 acquired DICE, developer of the very popular Battlefield series.

The roots of success

As with other Swedish digital successes - the streaming giant Spotify, the fintech Klarna ... - several analysts put forward the adoption of the "home PC reform" to explain the good Swedish position.

In 1997, the Parliament adopted this reform, accompanied by tax advantages, which allowed many Swedes to rent a computer through their employer.

They thus very early on became common in Swedish homes.

But for Per Strömbäck, spokesperson for the Swedish video game industry, the real roots of today's success can be traced back to the "boy's rooms of the 80s".

"This is a generation who learned to program on Commodore 64, and who learned to create games by playing Dragons and Demons (a Swedish game similar to Dungeons and Dragons, note)", explains- he told AFP, pointing out that most of the major Swedish studios were founded by people born in the 1970s.

Another key phase: the collapse of the Internet bubble in 2000. The Swedish studios of the time, until then more focused on educational games for the domestic market, disappeared and from these ashes was born a new generation of studios. have targeted the international market.

"It is this change of direction (...) which laid the foundations for export success", explains the expert.

The success of the independents

Many Swedish video game studios, such as Massive Entertainment or Embark, are now developing so-called "AAA" quality games with budgets in the tens of millions of dollars comparable to those of Hollywood films.

But several of them triumphed thanks to the surprise success of small teams or independent studios.

Frictional Games, based in Helsingborg (south), had only a handful of employees when the now famous game "Amnesia: The Dark Descent" was released in 2010.

The game also helped publicize PewDiePie, a Swedish YouTuber who has become one of the most famous in the world, thanks to his frightening reactions to the horror images in the game.

Markus Persson, also known as Notch, alone created the original version of Minecraft.

Become an international phenomenon, the game was sold with the company Mojang in 2014 to Microsoft for 2.5 billion dollars.

Developer Iron Gate had a team of just five people when it released Valheim in early February, a game based on Norse mythology that has since been downloaded 5 million times.

© 2021 AFP