How Sweden's Tiniest University Built a Game-Development System That Shaped the World

"We're not exactly a famous city, and that probably confuses people — how did a place like this end up building such an innovative, tightly knit community? Maybe it can't be copied elsewhere, but we're happy to share how we did it."

If you haven't played Goat Simulator yourself, you've almost certainly watched someone else play it. This physics-engine-wrecking game — equal parts dumb and hilarious — took over nearly every game streamer's channel in 2014. Dismissed by "serious" media, it still blew past a million copies sold, an unmistakable viral phenomenon. The studio behind it, Coffee Stain Studios, became an overnight name, instantly stamped onto Sweden's game-industry business card and written into every year's industry report since.

This singular game came from a flash of inspiration at an independent studio, but it's also the product of a system. In our previous piece, we looked at why Sweden became fertile ground for game development — its hardware foundations, gaming culture, and community-building. In this piece, through the accounts of a university lecturer, a staff member at a game incubator, and the program director of a regional game organization, we'll get inside the system that produces games like Goat Simulator, and see exactly how it works. This is a low-profile system that players never see — its "miniature" scale makes it easy to overlook — but that hasn't stopped it from turning the creativity and inspiration of wave after wave of game makers into real revenue, which flows back into Sweden's economy. It's this very system that lets a tiny city host the country's biggest game industry conference every year.

This is the story of Skövde.

1. A tiny university in a tiny city

Skövde isn't a stop most tourists make. It's an unremarkable station on the busy Stockholm–Gothenburg rail line — the station doesn't even have English signage. The city covers about the same area as Shanghai's Xuhui District; a single A3-size map can accurately capture every street and building in it. It might appeal to a certain kind of adventurous traveler, though: sitting between Sweden's two largest lakes, Vänern and Vättern, its outskirts are ringed by rolling forests, hills, and lakes — prime terrain for hiking and mountaineering.

Once a horse-trading town, and later, in the Middle Ages, a pilgrimage site built around the reputation of a local saint, Skövde remained one of Sweden's smallest towns well into the 18th century — in 1700, it had just 154 permanent residents. Today its population has grown to about 50,000, still tiny by any measure. Under a conventional lens, the local economy is anchored by one of Volvo's largest engine plants in the world — you can see the giant "VOLVO" letters lined up along the railway the moment you step off the train. Volvo employs more than 5,000 people here, making it, without question, the region's largest employer.

But what has drawn fresh talent and international attention to Skövde in recent years has nothing to do with a glossy big company or trendy urban infrastructure. It's the city's young, fast-growing cultural core that put it on the map. Facing the question of how to keep the local economy growing, the municipal government looked past traditional industry and landed on the vibrant game industry instead.

That's why the University of Skövde became the new center of local development. Founded in 1977 in the city's northeast, the university is quite young, and also the smallest in Sweden — yet locals take particular pride in its smallness. With only about 3,500 students, it still ranks 7th among Swedish universities, with influence that reaches around the world. Its thinking has always run ahead of the curve, its attitude open, its decisions bold: it built one of Sweden's largest IT schools back in the 1990s, launched its first game-focused program as early as 2002 — making it one of the first universities in the world to teach game development — and today has more than 500 students studying game design there.

Seventeen years of development have let this curriculum mature. All game-related research now falls under the School of Media, Technology, and Culture, divided into five tracks: society and culture, music and creative practice, narrative arts, video games, and human-computer interaction. Depending on the specific track, students graduate with either a science degree or an arts/humanities degree.

The university offers five undergraduate game programs — design, writing, graphics, programming, and music — and added its first graduate program in 2007: serious games, which explores how games can serve functions in healthcare, training, education, marketing, and other fields. "Games aren't just pure entertainment — they can serve another purpose entirely." In 2011, culture became a formal focus too, with "Digital Storytelling: Games and Cultural Heritage" launching as a new master's program, where students typically explore how cultural heritage can be represented in games, often in partnership with museums across the region.

Marcus Toftedahl, a lecturer at the University of Skövde, has taught game design and writing there for a decade and is currently pursuing a PhD focused on the Chinese game market. In his view, the core of Skövde's game curriculum is interdisciplinary collaboration — students with technical and media backgrounds are routinely required to complete assignments together, which better reflects the reality of the game industry. "In indie games especially, you need to know a bit of everything." After a handful of courses, students get thrown together and asked to make a game as fast as possible — a 2D game in year one, maybe a 3D one in year two. Unlike many schools that rely on rendered animation to simulate the final product, everything here is built inside an actual game engine from the start.

Skövde's academic approach to games is a big part of its appeal, especially its focus on serious games and cultural heritage — seen as ways to expand what games can do and give them more purpose and meaning.

Of course, most students still have their sights set on making games for a living, and Skövde's support doesn't end at graduation — it carries through into their careers. After three years of undergraduate study, students nearing graduation can choose to work at a game company — which, in a Sweden hungry for game talent, is almost trivially easy — or to start their own venture. For those who choose the latter, the incubator next door to campus, The Game Incubator, is the natural next step.

2. The incubator that wove a whole system together

The first thing the Swedes we spoke to wanted to stress: the incubator is completely free.

That sets it apart from most startup incubators, which typically charge companies a fee — often 6% or 10% of profits. Skövde's incubator, by contrast, is a nonprofit and charges nothing. It helps university students, and anyone else who clears the application process, build a company step by step, offering free office space, lounge areas, hardware, business courses, and access to publishers and industry events — charging only a token monthly fee of 50 euros for equipment and office space.

Its funding comes from the Municipality of Skövde and the Västra Götaland region, centered on Gothenburg. The incubator itself grew out of Gothia Science Park (GSP), which sits next to the university and is part of the regional game organization Game Arena. Founded in 1998, GSP does roughly what any science park does — incubating companies, investing in startups, and facilitating collaboration between them — across fields including software engineering, finance, and e-commerce.

In 2004, a team of 15 graduates from the University of Skövde's game program approached GSP hoping to publish a game. This was new territory for GSP — at the time, its incubator was a generic tech-startup incubator with no particular knowledge of how to publish a game or build a game company. Once GSP realized game companies worked completely differently from a typical IT department, and that they carried real potential, it decided to build a dedicated game-focused track. With the incubator's help, that graduate team went on to partner with Paradox Interactive in 2017 to publish the once-buzzy MMO strategy game Dreamlords, under the company name Lockpick Entertainment.

Fifteen years on, the incubator has created more than 500 local jobs and helped over 100 startups get off the ground. Not all of them survived, but mergers and acquisitions are simply normal in the game industry, and displaced employees usually find new jobs elsewhere right away — and as Skövde's and the incubator's reputation has grown, those employees' résumés tend to look pretty good too.

The Swedes we spoke with kept coming back to the government support behind all this, calling it "the safest partner you could have" — one that says yes to almost anything. "Sometimes we just have to say, 'we need a new building to house this many students,' and it happens fast."

"The Skövde municipality made the right call. How do you create more jobs? Getting Volvo to hire another 500 people isn't really realistic, given automation and more work going overseas. The game industry, with the university feeding it talent right next door, is obviously the better path forward. The regional government has been trying to steer Skövde toward a safe direction to grow in, so they're willing to do whatever it takes to help," said Per Micael Nyberg, the incubator's business development advisor. "We're using Swedish taxpayer money to invest in entrepreneurs and startups, helping them grow, turn a profit, and ultimately succeed — and that generates more tax revenue that flows back into Sweden's system. It's all long-term. Quick money isn't what interests us."

On the Game Incubator's website, you'll find a roadmap that roughly lays out how anyone hoping to start a game studio can find their own "shortcut" to get there.

That shortcut, in practice, is not really easy. It gives newcomers a glimpse of the established path into the industry and offers a degree of guidance along the way, but it also involves rigorous screening at every stage — effectively preparing them for the fight to survive on their own once they're out.

Any Swede can fill out an application form on the website (currently open only to Swedish residents, though they plan to extend the program abroad once visa issues are sorted out). The hard requirement is founding a company in Sweden, along with genuine commitment: "We don't take people who are just interested in making games — they have to have decided this is their path, ready to make games for a living," Nyberg added. Applications go through a screening round, where incubator staff pick out the ideas that show real potential.

The first official phase of the program is the "startup phase," lasting three months. The incubator provides free office space near the university, hardware, and on-demand access to business advisors. Participants have a single core task: verification. A project can't rest on nothing more than a feeling — "my friend likes it" or "someone liked it on social media" doesn't count. It has to target an audience willing to actually pay. To confirm their project really has that kind of paying support, participants have to start collecting real data. If they're building a PC game, they're expected to set up a Discord channel, get people to download and play it, and make sure users are genuinely engaged; if there's no playable build yet, they should at minimum post a trailer and gather honest audience feedback. Other small tasks include settling on a company name, setting up social media accounts, and putting together a logo and website.

After the startup phase comes the first "Pitch" — a mini-review where participants present their project to a panel made up of incubator staff, investors, publishers, and industry veterans. Games that pass verification move on to the next stage; those that don't get a second chance, returning to the previous phase for another three months of revision. For the panel members, this is also a chance to spot promising ideas early — some projects that don't pass may just need polish and repackaging, and an interested investor can reach out to the team right away to discuss working together down the line.

Teams that pass verification then move into six months of advanced business training, refining their game further along the way. Skövde students may have picked up some basic business knowledge in their second- or third-year coursework, but according to Magnus Ling, Game Arena's program director, these students still know essentially nothing about how to actually run a business — how to found a company, put together a business plan, choose a leader, or sort out copyright and IP licensing. They learn all of that through a series of discussion sessions and workshops. The incubator doesn't provide funding, so participants have to find work nearby to support themselves — whether that's flipping burgers at McDonald's or, ideally, interning at a game company — all while attending these evening sessions. Over this period, they nail down their business model, business plan, and marketing strategy, and start reaching out to publishers and investors.

The second Pitch is where they present their business plan and their team's potential to the panel. The panel evaluates whether the CEO is up to the job, while Game Arena takes the newcomers to international game conferences — GDC, various Gamescom events — to help them meet more people in the industry.

Last comes a six-month "venture phase," during which the team completes the game's release and builds a sustainable business plan. If you're a Skövde student, this is also when you graduate. A successful launch means the company has found its footing — you're invited to join the local game community as a "veteran," and someday you might come back to teach a class or sit on the panel judging a future Pitch.

"Our goal isn't to make games — it's to focus on growing companies and creating jobs," Ling said.

He also believes the university remains the region's key engine. Skövde's game program covers everything — designers, artists, programmers, business students — letting students form complete development teams from within their own ranks and start building right away. The close geographic proximity of the university, the incubator, and the science park also makes it easy to organize cross-level events that strengthen ties between newer and more established members of the community. "Once startups mature, they bring what they've learned back to their alma mater. In a lot of these companies, every single employee is a Skövde graduate, and they're all eager to help the next generation."

Coffee Stain Studios is the incubator's most famous success story — all nine of its founders came out of the University of Skövde, making it a product of the Skövde game system from start to finish.

Of course, the game they first pitched to the panel wasn't Goat Simulator. The team's original project was a mobile platform-jumper called 1<3 Strawberries — even though they weren't actually interested in mobile games at all. They set that preference aside just to clear the review, going instead with what was probably the safest, most reliably profitable business plan they could think of. That laid the financial groundwork for the two well-received tower-defense PC games, both titled Sanctum, that came after.

What happened next looked accidental, but was in some sense inevitable — without the university and the incubator behind them, they'd have had a hard time reaching the point where they could build Goat Simulator in two months and rush it out while the moment was hot. Coffee Stain has since become independent, leaving its cheap-rent space behind for newer teams and converting an old movie theater downtown into its new studio. It's also opened a branch at DevHub in Malmö, and its new game, Satisfactory, is in beta — everything running smoothly.

The incubator gives dreamers a signpost; once they're inside the program, everything after that comes down to how hard they're willing to work.

Angry Demons Studio, despite its irritable, rebellious-sounding name, is actually a remarkably disciplined team. This young five-person crew was already sitting in their designated little room at the science park on a sunny midday — right around when most night-owl developers are still asleep or procrastinating — working on Apsulov, a new game due out this fall. According to Ling, they show up like this every single day, steady as office workers, which is exactly how we managed to catch them in an otherwise nearly empty building. That kind of self-discipline is probably why their debut title, Unforgiving: A Northern Hymn — a horror game rooted in Swedish folklore — turned out unusually polished for a first effort.

John Kalderon, who leads the team, was happy to have Chinese visitors. He recalled: "At one point our game suddenly started getting a lot of sales from China — it seemed like people were finding us through some site starting with 'B'..."

Things moved quickly after that. We chatted for a bit about Bilibili and Apsulov, and then Ling suddenly turned to Kalderon: "Hey, I think you should come to ChinaJoy with us!"

3. Testing the waters in China's game market

Game Arena — the organization that helps Skövde's game companies and titles gain international attention, and arranges Skövde's trips abroad — is also funded by the regional government.

Besides leading delegations to game industry gatherings around the world, Game Arena hosts the Swedish Game Conference here every October — the country's biggest game industry event. Founded a decade ago, it has drawn a growing crowd of industry professionals every year, from roughly 300 attendees at the start to a point where it now has to fill Arena Skövde, the city's largest venue. In 2018, more than 1,000 people from 32 countries attended, taking in keynote talks, roundtable discussions, workshops, and competitions, alongside a B2B zone, game showcases, an awards ceremony, and parties. Each year's talks are built around a theme drawn from that year's industry conversation — last year it was "games and politics," this year, "sustainability."

Once again, Skövde's tiny scale stands in sharp contrast to the scale of the conference itself. What sets it apart from any other major game industry gathering is, naturally, its academic atmosphere. "We take real pride in the academic research happening in games here."

But Skövde's environment may almost be too comfortable — something that gives the three people we interviewed, each from a different part of the system but not developers themselves, a bit of pause. Swedish games generally aim at a global audience, but they'd like to see local developers pay particular attention to fast-emerging, high-potential markets — China chief among them.

"Local studios don't really think about the Chinese market — they just want to release on Steam or the App Store, and we'd like to see them engage with more interesting markets instead."

None of the studios we met on this trip to Sweden brought up any China plans on their own. Unless it comes up specifically, or they've had some direct experience with it, they don't tend to realize what China's massive consumer base could offer them.

To the academic, the business development advisor, and the program director we spoke with, ignoring this huge opportunity — and more "advanced" business models elsewhere — is clearly something Skövde's studios need to work on. And in an environment of ever-fiercer competition and an exploding number of games across every platform, knowing one more market means one more path to survival. "Your game might sell only a few hundred copies on Steam, but find another platform, and that number might reach 10,000. Bottom line: you need to look for other paths."

The system's way of engaging with the Chinese market is through short-term, culturally focused game courses at Chinese universities. China has no formal game design major, and few parents are willing to let their children study anything with "games" in the name. Chinese universities and vocational colleges train programmers, artists, and animators — an education that sits far from the creative core of game-making: level design and narrative art. Students from different disciplines rarely collaborate, and once they're kept apart like this, many end up as "blue-collar" workers at outsourcing firms.

Sweden is nearly the opposite. Uppsala University north of Stockholm, the University of Gothenburg on the west coast, Malmö University in the south — universities in Sweden's major cities all offer game design degrees. It's treated as a legitimate profession, with the education and credentials to match.

Toftedahl, who has spent three years researching the Chinese market, has made repeated trips to China over the past few years — enough that he's become fluent in making Chinese-style PowerPoint slides. Through personal connections, the University of Skövde and Game Arena found Chinese universities willing to collaborate. Toftedahl and his colleagues recently set up a Swedish-flavored short course at Jiangnan University in Wuxi (the first was held at the University of Science and Technology Beijing). Working with a small class of 35 students, the Swedish instructors taught them how to think creatively, then split them into four-person teams — two programmers and two artists — and gave them a week to build a game. These games are prototyped on paper first, "because paper can be thrown away anytime — you can keep revising your ideas. Once you've expressed them in code, you get attached, and it's much harder to let go."

Toftedahl recalled that cross-disciplinary collaboration was a genuinely novel experience for the Chinese students, who said they rarely got chances like this. It took some effort to get them to interact more with instructors. Another thing that stuck with him: Chinese universities have a surprisingly large number of women in programming. "This is something we should be learning from China — we need to figure out why so many women in China are drawn to tech." (Western countries, by contrast, often need dedicated diversity programs to get more women into STEM courses, games, and the tech industry.)

They plan to return to Beijing in May to run the same course at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, then head to Shanghai Normal University after summer. They're clearly selective about which schools they partner with: "We don't care about rankings — we only work with the right schools, ones we trust each other with. We also don't put much faith in partnerships arranged by senior officials; we trust connections built between teachers and between students far more. The course only runs a week, but for some of these students, that week alone might be enough to matter."

Even so, Skövde is looking to turn these short courses into something longer-term. The Shanghai Normal University project will be a joint effort between Swedish and Chinese students: Swedish students will spend a week and a half in Shanghai first; once they're back in Sweden, they'll keep collaborating with the Chinese students over WeChat; and finally, the Chinese students will travel to Sweden to complete the course together.

In fact, eight Skövde students have already been placed for a two-month internship at Tencent's NExT Studios, where they test games and give feedback, observe how game development works in China, and learn how things get done inside a Chinese company. There's also a less tangible benefit that comes from living abroad — "Swedish students need this kind of experience, need to know what it feels like to be a minority somewhere unfamiliar. It humbles you," added Nyberg, who himself lived in Japan for a long stretch.

They describe all of this as cultural and knowledge exchange. As with the incubator itself, the goal isn't quick money but long-term partnership — swapping resources and learning from each other. China is short on designers, Sweden is short on production staff — it looks like a near-perfect complement.

"In the China-Japan-Korea market — at least on mobile — user habits around mobile games are more advanced than what Western consumers are used to. We need to learn from that and evolve. Asian markets have denser user bases, get bombarded with far more information, and live completely different lifestyles from ours. We need to understand how to break into a completely different kind of region if we want to build our international competitiveness."

Asked whether they understood the "uncertainty" of the Chinese game market, the Swedes answered with a clear yes. They know that policy shifts, the game-license approval process, and the quality of localization can all deeply affect a game's sales, and that China's famously chaotic Android landscape is far more complex to navigate than the West's single, unified Google Play market — it demands an entirely different strategy of its own. Still, "just knowing all of this already helps us make better-informed decisions."

Skövde's university-incubator system may be hard to replicate wholesale elsewhere, but as we noted in our previous piece, different regions across Sweden each have their own draw, and studios with completely different approaches can each find soil that suits them. That lets their goals and their paths stay simple: make good games, and survive.

In our next piece, we'll focus on three studios that have managed to do just that — thriving, each by finding a way to produce something truly its own.

Cover image from Goat Simulator and Satisfactory; in-text images, unless otherwise noted, taken by our reporter.