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Digital Games

When Massive Entertainment moved to Malmö in 2000, it was a significant moment. The video game studio would become a big name in the industry, while the city and surrounding area would become a thriving hub for game development.

Today, Malmö has approximately 5 times more game studios than London and Montreal per capita. Companies based in the city and surrounding area have been behind popular titles like Little Nightmares, Smash Hit, The Division, Touchgrind BMX, and Year Walk.

“The internationally successful releases from smaller Malmö studios such as Simogo, Vitamin, and Mediocre has put forward an example for the community and strengthened the local industry’s self-esteem,'' David Polfeldt, former CEO, Massive Entertainment.

In 2017, Massive Entertainment was commissioned to develop a game based on the Avatar universe. The 100 million euro contract stretching over 10 years to hire and employ, dream up and design, can be seen as another potential spark for a surge in growth in Skåne’s gaming industry.

The sector’s revenue in all of Sweden grew a total of 33% in 2018, a year in which Swedish registered game development companies created more than 2,500 new jobs, an increase by 48% since 2017 (Swedish Game Developer Index 2019).

“The most interesting aspect for us is that Malmö has a few bigger game developers already. We can be competitive both with regards to salary and in offering interesting projects and a great culture. This has helped us recruit good talent as we hoped for,” Martin Buhl Svanum, COO, IO Interactive.

Read about how we helped the Danish AAA games studio IO Interactive establish a subsidiary in Malmö

Advantages of Skåne

Advantages when choosing Malmö and the Skåne region for your game development business:

  • Low development costs Out of all the game hubs in Europe, Skåne has one of the lowest game development costs and the tax deduction offered for game studios is approximately 7.7%.
     
  • Access to world-leading talent The Game Assembly, the 4th top school for game development, is based in Malmö and graduates 100 professionals every year as Game Animators, Game Graphic Designers, Game Programmers, Level Designers, and Technical Artists.
     
  • Presence of large global players In the last few years some of the largest players in the global digital games industry have established or invested in the region, including: Avalanche, IO Interactive, King, Supercell, Tencent, THQ, and Massive, a Ubisoft studio.

Page updated 20 Jul 2022, at 13:13