Massive Entertainment: Game Development, Design & Monetization

My name is Martin Walfisz and my background in gaming really starts in the 80s, where I started to game and play on the Commodore 64. That really turned me onto computers and, I have to say, I really have a computer geek background. I may be less of a geek now but still, I identify as a computer geek. In the 90s, I studied software engineering at university and then, in 1997, I founded Massive Entertainment, which is one of the world’s largest game studios today.

mCurrently, I work at Nordisk Games, as an investor. I am a senior partner, investing in game studios and game developers, primarily, in Europe. Before I became an investor, I was a game developer for a good 23 years and I really have a background as a computer geek and a programmer. I love games and I play as many games as I can.

We started Massive in Sweden and, back then, in the late 90s, there were not many game studios, at all, in Sweden. Maybe there were two or three. DICE already existed and then there was another studio called UDS, that doesn’t exist anymore. Then we founded Massive. Sweden was really a backwater for computer games, back in those days. Where it really happened was in the US and the UK and, to some extent, Germany and France. None of the people who started working at Massive, in those early years, had any experience doing games, including me, of course. Actually, to be honest, most of the people that started working at Massive didn’t even have experience working. We were mostly students or other people who had never really had a job before.

We started on PC, just because it was so much easier. Everyone could buy a PC. We focused on PC games for the first seven, eight, 10 years of the company. Then eventually, the company moved more into console. I have to say, I stayed on board for about 12 years, so I focused mostly on PC. When I left, the company moved more to console.

PC has always been there and in the industry, we used to say that it was quite cyclical. When the new consoles came out, PC was a bit less interesting. Then when the current console generation started to feel old, PCs came back. I think that has shifted a bit in the last 10 years. The PC is its own living organism, regardless of the console cycles. It’s a bit like mobile games and mobile devices; it’s just there and quite ubiquitous. Also, as Asia has become more and more prominent in the gaming industry, PC has also picked up, because outside of Japan, consoles were never very popular in Asia.

Yes, that is a huge shift. Digital distribution has really changed everything. It’s so much easier for developers to self-publish and have immediate access through their consumers, through the players, by using Steam and the other distribution channels.