A tale of two very empty game studios

Tita and Lexa escaped their lives as stray dogs in Buenos Aires, to a small town in Sweden. They also brought their humans, Paula Cal and Flor Coletta, with them on their journey. Or was it the other way around? Anyway, Paula and Flor also happen to be skilled games developers who are currently working on a new strategy game at Palindrome Interactive.

Horse games have actually been big since the 90’s, yet they are rarely discussed in neither games media nor among games collectors. Thomas Sunhede, Retro Games Advisor at Embracer, dives into the Games Archive and tries to understand why this is.

With eight million copies sold, the Viking survival game Valheim is one of this year’s great success stories in the games industry. This is the story of how it all started and where it’s going from here. Meet Iron Gate studio founder Henrik Törnqvist, community manager Lisa Kolfjord and publisher Sebastian Badylak of Coffee Stain Studios.

Content warning: This video contains discussions about mental health and suicide. Jace Varlet is a popular community manager at Coffee Stain Studios, reaching thousands each week in his streams. But once the camera is off, another reality awaits. Jace suffers from bipolar II disorder, a chronic mental illness, characterized by periods of severe depression and hypomania.

Once again we sent game historian Martin Lindell into the secret vault, where Embracer Group’s growing game collection is stored. This time he found something really rare – a tabletop arcade machine called Adventure Vision, from 1982.

Koch Media became part of Embracer Group in 2018, and everything has been grand. There’s just one tiny problem that seems hard to resolve. How do you pronounce Koch? CEO Klemens Kundratitz knows all the ways to say it, and what not to say.

”It’s a mixture of excitement and horror”, says Lisa Kolfjord. Late last year she was hired as a 3D artist and community manager by a small indie studio, developing their first game. The game was called Valheim. When it was released in February, Valheim became a huge hit, with millions of players. As the person in charge of such a big player community, Lisa Kolfjord’s working life has changed. A lot.

What do you do when you are a brilliant game developer who just wants to make the games of your dreams, but really don’t want to have to deal with the business side of things? Well, you could do what Mattias Kylén did.

Deep down in a secret vault, Embracer Group’s growing game collection is stored at the moment. But we have early access, and game historian Martin Lindell has picked out a selection of classics from the archive, to show us. We’ll soon be back with more stories from the collection.

Developing a game is hard under the best of circumstances, but how do you cope when a pandemic strikes unexpectedly? Producer Michele Caletti knows all about it.