Mattias Wiking is a household name in the Swedish videogame industry: he’s founded and worked for a number of studios, including Starbreeze, Paradox Arctic (owned by Paradox Interactive, the company behind games like Cities: Skylines, Europa Universalis, and Crusader Kings), mobile game studio Turborilla, and, most recently, Winterkeep Interactive, a five-person studio working on a fantasy 4X strategy game.
“It’s exciting to go back to the roots a little bit, working with a smaller team with people I’ve worked with before, on a game I’m really excited about” Mattias said about his latest (ad)venture.
Lawyer sat down with him earlier this year to talk about what he’s learned from his life (he’s still only 49 years old) in videogames.
“I’ve had a really exciting career so far and I’m so grateful for the opportunities that have been offered me,” he said.
Beginning in the early aughts, Mattias has done it all over the 25 years he’s been in the industry. A programmer-turned-producer-turned-founder-turned-CEO, he and his studios have worked on indie projects, AA-titles, and mobile games—and he’s learned a bunch.
“At the end of the day it’s all about people, and working with passion-driven people. It can be a challenge to be passionate and ‘soft’ while also working with ‘harder’ things like budgets and deadlines, so it’s about finding that balance,” Mattias said.
People outside the videogame industry sometimes misunderstand it as a tech-heavy sector, with developers simply hammering away at their keyboards all day with little human-to-human interaction, he noted.
“We have more in common with a circus than an IT company,” Mattias said. “We create something that is supposed to entertain people.”
Something he’s brought from his time at Turborilla to Winterkeep is early testing. In mobile games, A/B testing is common early in the development, while many console and PC games remain hidden from players years into development. Testing aspects of your game early lowers the risk of getting years into development and realizing, upon testing it on players, that no one likes it, Mattias said.
In five years, he hopes that Winterkeep’s first game has been published and is doing well, and that the studio is working on more titles. He also sees himself continuing the work of growing the videogame industry in northern Sweden.
“We’ve said we’re going to grow old and gray at Winterkeep. But I’m driven by growing the industry too, so in 5-10 years time I think I’ll have one foot in Winterkeep and the other in building something here in the region.”