Petri Lankoski & Mikolaj Dymek

Abstract

This paper looks at the history of game industry platforms in Finland and Sweden between 1979 and 2020 via 745 games. Both are relatively small countries where developers perform exceptionally well in a global market context. Developers and games developed in both countries are rather similar with some notable differences: Finnish developers focused on mobile games on Symbian in the 2000s, whereas Swedish developers focused on PC and console games, continuing a PC focus during the 2010s. The number of
game companies have increased rapidly in Finland and Sweden since 2010 but peaked in Finland in 2014. From a platform studies perspective, our data highlight rewarding historical insights about
the dynamics of game industry platforms in Finland and Sweden with dimensions such as influence by demo scene, price of hardware/software (computers), mathematics education, third-party
game engines, and finally higher education programmes in game development, consequently framing the data in socio-material perspectives on game industry platforms as application ecologies

Keywords: Finland, Sweden, Game industry history, platform

https://doi.org/10.1145/3582437.3587214

In Foundations of Digital Games 2023 (FDG 2023), April 12–14, 2023, Lisbon, Portugal. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 4 pages.