Total Whiteout

We run into them. [laughs] I mean, we don't hang out at their offices really, but we met Might and Delight at GamesCom, who we obviously know already. Outbreak are based in Gothenberg, so it's a little more difficult to bump into them, but obviously we're all in contact with them.

First and foremost, I think that there's a lot of talent here. I definitely think that Sweden will stay strong. Looking at the games that have been coming out of Sweden recently, it's really cool stuff. Just Cause 2 from Avalanche was great, Bad Company 2 was great too. So I definitely think that it will hang on for a long time.

Well, we don't have any tax breaks. We have the Nordic game programme, which is state funded and is a collaboration, I think, between Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Iceland and Finland, or something - the Nordic area. It helps fund development, which you have apply for. But apart from that we don't have any government support in the way of tax cuts or anything like that. I think, of course, it would be good to have. [laughs]

We spent some time at the Canadian booth at GamesCom. After three days we were seriously considering relocating. It's insane! Those guys have it really good in Canada.

I think what's interesting is that we're all doing so well anyway. We have DICE, we have Avalanche - and all the small developers, and they're all doing great. I think that proves the talent here.

I think it's probably a combination of both. We have some really good game schools - I think there's probably five or six, they're really really good, and when game companies recruit they obviously look to the game schools. Plus, they've already been working on projects.

I think what Joel means is that when you are in university you are attached to a project most of the time when you're there. Working in small teams, seeing projects from start to finish, albeit smaller ones, so when you come out of university, or the game school, you know you have some experience of what it's like to work in a team for a studio. You're not sitting at your desk all day drawing for yourself or programming for yourself, you're working together.

And most of these schools also have a semester of internship, which is another really easy way to get into the company and for the company to get to know the person.

Even though we only announced the company a few months ago, we've actually been around since last year, and we've been messing around with everything. We've worked on contact bases, we've done Flash games. We actually have two small Flash games on Facebook. We don't support them at the moment, they were like a proving ground for us. We wanted to get them out and see what we could do.

They're easy to make, right? They're small and cheap to make and they were a good way of getting our team together - getting experience, finding our groove. So absolutely something that we will look at in the future - I actually think they represent a general shift in the industry. I think the Wii, in a way was the first symptom of a changing environment in games - you don't just have these so called hardcore games anymore.

You have people who play all kinds of games. The whole demographics of games is changing. You're not a gamer anymore, you're just someone who plays games. People play games.

I think in a recent report they found that 40 per cent of all gamers are now women. That's great to me. It's fantastic to be in that environment. Swimming in that ocean, if you will, where everything is changing. There is a lot of opportunity there now, and I'd love to try it in the future, maybe with all the platforms that there are - go cross-platform.

It's a tricky question. I think it depends very much on the game. In film for example, you have four patterns. Every studio that approves a film knows about these four patterns: male and female above 25 and below 25 - and the perfect film will appeal to all four.

I think that games are still finding their way around that, right now we only think is these kind of boxes: the social game and the shooter, these kind of things - and I guess with games it's harder to transgress these things, because... games are hard, right? Some people might not feel like playing a shooter because you are the one holding the mouse or the controller, but I think in the future there's a lot of room to break down those barriers.

We've already seen games like Limbo for example - everyone plays that game. Everyone loves that game. I don't think I've talked to anyone, girl or guy, that didn't like that game, and that for me is really a hopeful thing.