"Hooks," Experience, and Thinking About Life: How a Swedish Game Studio Found Its Footing Without Choking on Its Own Ambition

In game-friendly Sweden, Frictional Games made the Amnesia series and SOMA. To avoid the kind of post-expansion collapse that has swallowed other studios, they hold hard to a few principles.

"Sweden's summers are short and its winter nights are long, so I guess everyone just stays home and makes games."

Minecraft, Battlefield, Cities: Skylines, Candy Crush — a lot of the games you have played, or are playing right now, were made in Sweden. Why are Swedes so good at this? Anton Albiin has a deadpan answer.

This past November, Albiin led a group of Swedish developers on a Nordic games delegation to Asia. China is a market no one can ignore: about 30% of the players of Swedish-made games come from Steam China. Albiin's title is project manager at Swedish Games Industry (Dataspelsbranschen), where he arranges meetings, training and knowledge-sharing for studios large and small, and helps them reach publishers abroad and widen their international audience.

Sweden's game industry has grown fast for years with no sign of slowing. Compared with five years ago, revenue is up 257%, profits have jumped tenfold, and the number of companies has grown by 137%.

This large system began to take shape about ten years ago. Startup incubators spread across the big cities — Stockholm, Gothenburg, Malmö — over that decade, Albiin says, while university towns like Uppsala, wanting a business ecosystem of their own, joined local tech parks. Newcomers, propped up by the money and tools of the big companies, then found success in games very quickly. Coffee Stain Studios (Goat Simulator) is the textbook case.

Today one in ten gamers worldwide is playing a Swedish game. Household names — Mojang, EA DICE, and Paradox Interactive, nicknamed "P Corp" by Chinese players — all sit in Swedish cities. Indie studios serve the core crowd: Little Nightmares (Tarsier Studios), Hotline Miami (Dennaton Games), Unravel (Coldwood), A Way Out (Hazelight Studios). King once ruled casual mobile gaming with Candy Crush. This Nordic country has built a solid reputation, and the well-reviewed titles keep coming, year after year.

"We have a long history of innovation," Albiin said when asked why the industry is so lively in Sweden. "Plenty of our people owned home computers back in the '80s and '90s, and kids grew up alongside the personal computer. Our culture has also always held to one principle: find work that genuinely satisfies you and makes you happy, build a career on enjoyment, be driven by passion. Games are an industry full of passion... and, well, Sweden's summers are short and its winter nights are long, so people stay indoors and make games."

One more thing matters, he added: Sweden plays down hierarchy, starting with the school system. So when people run into a problem during development they tend to say so directly, unlike in places with rigid ranks, where employees may be too embarrassed to speak. Communication in Sweden runs a great deal more smoothly.

Frictional Games, a studio built on survival horror, came out of that friendly environment. In 2010, before game streaming was popular, they had already scored a big hit with Amnesia: The Dark Descent — a 10/10 on Steam, a Metascore of 85. Every streamer whose name people could remember, PewDiePie included, pulled in clicks and traffic on the strength of the raw emotion the game wrung out of them.

Thomas Grip and Jens Nilsson founded the studio in 2007, built their own engine, HPL (named for H.P. Lovecraft), and have pushed further into survival horror ever since their first title, Penumbra. The two Amnesia games shook off the grip of publisher Paradox Interactive and were developed and released entirely on their own — mature work by any measure, and, in the words of a Rock, Paper, Shotgun editor, "the most successful horror game of all time."

In the game the player has no weapon and no way to fend off a monster. You have to memorize the routes through dim, oppressive, closed-in spaces and stay out of sight until the monsters lose interest in hunting you. You can hide in the dark, but your sanity meter drops, bringing hallucinations and making you easier to find; lighting a candle or an oil lamp holds sanity steady, but tinder and lamp oil are both consumables, and light can draw a monster's attention. Balancing light against dark, and slowly assembling the whole story out of scattered clues, is what makes Amnesia so hard to put down.

This nerve-shredding game of chase and evasion showed what Frictional Games could do with horror atmosphere and plotting — Amnesia may be more "authentic" than most of the games on the market wearing the Cthulhu label. Its elegant mechanics, which keep you tensed every second while still demanding cool judgment and resource management, carry a philosophy of horror far removed from the jump scares of its more ordinary peers.

Just as players were hoping Frictional would keep going and put out more horror in the same vein, the studio released a science-fiction game set in a deep-sea base in 2015: SOMA. You wake in a future undersea station that appears to be empty, face the wreckage all around you, and find your memory gone. You have to find answers fast, dodge the "monsters" on the way, and make choices that put your morals on trial. Oh, and it has an ending that sticks in the throat.

Apart from both being first-person, SOMA and Amnesia have nothing in common. SOMA does not have much gameplay; it is closer to an exploration-driven walking simulator with a thriller's atmosphere, though it keeps handing you surprises and shocks along the way. By the end, players realize they have been through a higher order of horror, the kind that scares you afterwards and that you would rather not dwell on, as the existential crisis rises in your chest. You find that, next to the questions the developers want you to sit with, the sea-floor monsters and the eerie machines are barely a threat at all.

Fredrik Olsson is an experienced developer. He worked at Tarsier Studios, and his name is in the credits of Little Nightmares. He joined Frictional Games just after SOMA shipped, when the studio was going through a change that was not small: from 12 people to 20; a split into two teams making two games at once; and one more lead producer.

That sounds simple, and it is the step many game studios get wrong. Go at it blindly and you end up like Telltale — once the king of episodic narrative-choice games, it expanded wildly, took on too many projects, and let its management drift, until in the end it shut down before it could even finish the game that made its name.

Olsson took part in the Nordic delegation's trip. He could not tell us the development details of Amnesia or SOMA, but he was glad to talk about the development model and business model Frictional Games has worked out, about what kind of game makes a player say "take my money," and about how a small independent studio finds its footing among a crowd of rivals without choking on its own ambition.

Q: QDaily

F: Fredrik; A: Albiin

Q: How do you keep coming up with new ideas inside one genre? Amnesia and SOMA are both survival horror, yet they are completely unalike.

F: Brainstorm, and settle on a core. If I had one piece of advice for independent developers, it would be to find a hook before you start building. The mistake people make beforehand is thinking, "we're going to make this kind of game, or that kind of game, we need puzzles, we need this mechanic or that one" — but where is the thing about your game that pulls people in?

Until we have the hook, we do nothing. Once we have it, we start asking what mechanics can support that hook, and how the story should open out and grow from there.

To spell out what a hook is: I think it is "what makes this game special." Say someone asks you what SOMA is about. You state the hook, and in a couple of sentences they have got the point of the game.

When someone asks, "hey, what game are you making," and all you say is "we're making a strategy game set in XX," they will probably say, "oh, good luck." That is not a hook. Your audience will never say, "wow, give me a beta code, I want to try it."

Q: Give us an example — what is the hook for SOMA, the science-fiction philosophy game?

F: In SOMA we try to explain the story through a question. Ask someone, before they play, whether they would be willing to have their consciousness go on existing inside a machine, and they will probably say no. After they finish the game, they may not be so sure. SOMA plays with people's sense of consciousness and makes them think about the worth of awareness and perception. This is a game made for people who go "deep."

A: Right, and some people simply will not be drawn to a game like that. As Paradox puts it, "a game made for everyone pleases no one." You are serving a particular group. If a developer just thinks, oh, I'll make a strategy game, or I'll make a shooter, and offers nothing unique along with it, then there is no selling point at all.

F: Exactly. If I say this game is about "robots underwater," that is not a hook either — definitely not the kind of game that makes you say "take my money."

The two games really are very different, and that gave us some trouble at first. Amnesia is flat-out terrifying, and some players who went on to SOMA complained that it did not deliver the fear of its predecessor. Others thought SOMA's level of horror was exactly right, because it let them concentrate on the game's philosophy and its story.

You see, making anything with a horror flavor after Amnesia is hard. The adjustment we made was to add a Safe Mode to SOMA a year ago, where no monster attacks you, so you have nothing to worry about — you just explore the story, take in the atmosphere, and taste the plot slowly. Plenty of people think you should not do that to a horror game, that it strips away its identity, but we had our reasons. And now we have built a Hard Mode for Amnesia: less lamp oil, monsters that spot you more easily, and you have to find enough save points. The pressure overall is much higher.

So when we look at these two games, both survival horror, what we see is how they differ, and we have worked out which mode suits each of them — which has gone over rather well. PewDiePie was streaming Amnesia on Hard Mode the other day, but I think he gave up and switched to Normal, saying he wanted to relive the original experience.

Also, though we keep trying different things, we hold on to what we are good at: strong storytelling and interesting mechanics, first person, everything built around a core concept, and so on. We do not want to take control away from the player, and we do not want to cut abruptly to a cutscene (*neither of these two heavily story-driven games has cutscenes; the whole story unfolds through the player's own exploration). We want players to take part. To be in the story, rather than have a mouthful of it forced on them.

Q: So do you see Amnesia as putting more weight on gameplay, and SOMA on narrative and reflection?

F: No. Gameplay and narrative go hand in hand... Which reminds me, SOMA does leave us with a small regret. It may have needed a bit more gameplay, so players could feel a stronger sense of challenge. We will get that right in the next two projects.

Q: Since you mention them, how much can you say about the two secret projects you are working on?

F: One is survival horror. The other is science fiction — not quite horror, but definitely an uncomfortable journey. Both are still heavily story-driven. Frictional's vision is to make games that get players thinking about complicated questions about life and the world, at least for as far ahead as we can see.

A: Has anyone told you? SOMA is basically about "existential dread."

F: Yes, yes, it is funny, because it is genuinely depressing. But we have also had a lot of emotional emails. One reader said finishing the game left him depressed, and also made him see how fragile life is, so he flew straight to the United States and married his girlfriend.

Q: From Penumbra to Amnesia to SOMA, you had the single-track process down and could keep up a steady output. Why did the studio suddenly double in size?

F: We expanded because we wanted to work on two fronts, making two games at the same time. There are a lot of benefits to that. Running several projects at once is in fact the "holy grail" game studios chase. Take a game like SOMA, which takes five years to make. You have a team of about 12 people, and once they finish their piece of the work they suddenly find there is nothing to do. They really have to move straight into new work the moment they finish, or you are burning money. But if you have only one team, they come off the last project and find the next one starts from zero — no prototype, no concept, nothing in pre-production — and the work begins under enormous pressure right there. You really must find everyone something to do immediately, or pre-production will suffer for it.

(*Pre-production covers the game concept, the game plan, prototyping and so on; full production covers programming, level design, art and sound, testing and so on.)

With two projects, we make sure one is always in pre-production and one in full production — the small team on the former, the big team on the latter. As soon as the project in full production ships, we start swapping teams over, so the big team moves onto full production for the project that has already had some time in pre-production. That gives every one of our games a better foundation, because we have had time to refine the prototype, think through the game's core, and so on.

Efficiency goes up along with it, of course. Shipping a game every three years beats every five, and releasing more games in the same span means bigger commercial returns.

I know a lot of studios have tried this and failed. (On Telltale) I do not think I should comment too much, but they probably leaned too hard on IP. Sticking to a similar game concept the whole way puts you in a fragile position. If your main mechanic starts to look less interesting to people, and you are focused only on IP — which means a large chunk of the money flows to the IP owner — then a few setbacks leave you very exposed.

We also do not develop several projects at once the way they did. We just use this "overlap" arrangement to keep everyone busy.

Q: Was the shift to this model hard to adjust to?

F: It was hard at first, because we tested it right after SOMA. A lot of people had to finish SOMA and go straight into pre-production on the next project, which was rough. But once we got through that first stretch of pre-production, the rotation kicked in and things gradually found their groove.

Thomas Grip, the founder, is the one who came up with the approach, and he also knew he could not be lead producer on two projects at once, so he handed the responsibility on. Two people now oversee the development of the two projects. After a year and a half of adjustment everything has settled, and the system runs very smoothly. The studio is still doing creative work, but it has a sturdier structure under it now.

Our development process has changed too. Our earlier games were all built in linear, chronological order. We have dropped that. Now we start from the game's core, the most critical part, and let it learn from that core and grow out from there, freely and organically.

Q: What do you make of games as a service? It is completely unlike your pay-once, single-player games.

F: It is a rather good model — people buy a game and it keeps getting updates and improvements. But that arrangement does not suit us. Our work is more like films and books, with a linear narrative. We might add a DLC after you finish, but we are not going to do the "oh, play it again and you'll get new items" thing. No, we won't. We know our audience and our market.

A: That is something a lot of Swedish studios do well, too — sticking to what they are good at.

F: If we have talked about anything else, it is probably VR. But we have decided against that road as well. Let the big companies test the water first and see what VR can actually become in this field. Mobile games we have never even considered. We lean toward paid games on consoles.

Q: What sets you apart from other independent studios?

F: Honestly, we do not spend much time watching how other people work. At meetups and the like I am happy to share with peers, of course, but our thinking is mostly inward. My guess is that the difference is that our people are scattered across the world and yet we have a firm, well-coordinated network. Frictional Games has 9 people in Sweden and more than 10 in different places abroad. Every day we post our personal goals and plans online, so everyone has to think through what they mean to get done before they post it, and that clears your head a great deal.

A: I had never heard another studio talk about the idea of a hook before. People usually talk about core mechanics and that sort of thing. What you seem to be stressing is a "feeling" and an "experience" — atmosphere, the parts that make people think.

F: Exactly, we build around experience. Every story is made of one experience after another. Say that within a two-week stretch we want to finish a beat like "enter a room, find a machine, learn to operate it, a monster bursts in and interrupts your plan." We break that into experiences: stepping into the room and looking around, exploring it, is one experience; finding the machine and learning to work it is another; and what follows might be the experience of "being chased by a monster." Once each of these is built, it goes straight to testing to see whether it achieves the effect we had in mind. I think other studios probably work in units of "sections," or chapters, and that is likely where we differ.

Q: Any more survival advice for independent studios?

A: Test your game as much as you can. Throw the product out there and let people play it. If people do not care, you have to change something, or just drop it. Because people have to care.

A lot of small studios want to behave like the big companies, which often keep a major project secret for years — but that is because they have deep knowledge and expert staff, and they know what they are doing. If your studio is small, you really need outsiders to help you judge whether the thing works, so do not run some secret project. Put your idea out there.

F: First, the hook I mentioned earlier. Do not try to conjure something out of thin air. Find the hook, then evolve from that base.

I have to admit Frictional Games now enjoys a luxury: we have two successes behind us and a reputation built up. Unfortunately a lot of startups and small independent studios do not have that luxury. We can keep a project under wraps now, because it actually makes the eventual reveal land better, but for everyone else, show your game early, get people excited, let people know what you are doing.

Also, do not start a game from mechanics. Start from the "core" — meaning, after the hook, what is the most critical thing? And when you show your game, show the "interesting mechanic," not "look, here's the inventory screen." You need to take advice from a source you can trust, one that can actually judge a game. Build a little, evaluate, test, revise, and go round again. Change in time, quit in time — it saves money, too.

Q: Did you learn anything from the China trip?

F: China's younger generation seems more willing to play core games, and they like hunting down paid games from abroad. These players seem more enthusiastic now about paid games than free ones. We had already planned to localize our earlier titles into Chinese before I came, and coming here made me surer that was the right call. Quite a few people came up to me saying, wow, you're the ones who made Amnesia. Maybe sales will climb further once the Chinese version is out.

This really is a completely different reality — players expect different things, business is done differently, the environment is always changing, and developers have to adapt in real time to policies and regulations that keep being rewritten. But one thing is the same: people want to play good games, and a good game will always succeed.

Cover image from SOMA and Amnesia: The Dark Descent