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invested. Their Japanese employers began to worry.
    Just before summer 2009, they received the fateful news; Square Enix was withdrawing the Final Fantasy contract from Grin, mumbling something about deficient quality, and canceled all payments. The Andersson brothers could only look on as their life’s work began to fall apart. The company they had devoted their lives to building was impossible to save. In the summer of 2009, Grin filed for bankruptcy and 250 people lost their jobs.
    2009 was a sobering year for the Swedish gaming industry. Several years of astronomical growth were followed by a major decline. Total sales in the industry fell by 17 percent. Since then, the figures have improved, but the fantastic growth of the first years of the twenty-first century has completely vanished.
    With constantly ballooning budgets and increasing competition for players’ cash, it’s easy to see, in retrospect, the signs that the gaming industry was painting itself into a corner. There’s nothing wrong with the games—interest in computer games is greater than ever, and Swedish-designed and developed games are internationally acclaimed. However, there is evidence that the traditional publishing model, favoring large, lavish game productions at the expense of smaller, bolder ideas and innovation, had perhaps grown about as large and profitable as it was going to get.
    This is where Midasplayer, into whose offices Markus first stepped in the fall of 2004, comes into play. Their business concept contradicts many of the industry’s established truths. The company develops only the kind of small, simple, web-based games that Markus was hired to design more of, games played on computers, cell phones, or on a tablet, either through an app or on the website King.com. Midasplayer offers innumerable versions of popular board games and card games, along with variations of well-known arcade games and puzzles. Most of them can be played free of charge—provided the player agrees to watch a few ads. Others cost a few dollars a month to play. In many of the games, you can even bet on yourself and win a few bucks if you’re good.
    Today, Midasplayer is one of Sweden’s largest gaming companies. In 2012, it had more than a hundred employees, tens of millions of players every day, and nearly $14 million in sales. The company is in many ways the antithesis of how a traditional game studio like DICE operates. It has no publishers or stores acting as middlemen—games are bought online and the players’ money goes right into the pockets of the game developers. Indicative of the potential that investors see in the model, the gaming giant Zynga, specializing in Facebook games and perhaps Midasplayer’s biggest competitor, had an estimated value of nearly $9 billion when it went public in December 2011. Most experts with an eye on the gaming industry feel that it’s the small, simple productions like the ones created by Zynga and Midasplayer that will reap the future profits. And it was in this corner of the industry that Markus began his career as a professional game developer.

 
    Chapter 5
    “They Just Don’t Get It.”
    Markus’s first few months at Midasplayer were good. Fantastic, even. Every morning, he got himself out of bed and out the door, to the commuter train and into Midasplayer’s office in central Stockholm. It was a dream job for a young game developer. Hundreds of thousands of people played the games he and his colleagues put out on the web. Besides, he was well paid.
    Markus was one of the first game developers to be hired at Midasplayer. Soon there were a few others, until around twenty people shared the office. Everyone worked according to the same, well-practiced model: each individual game was developed by a group of two to eight people and never took more than four months to finish. It was a fast and, more important, very cheap way to develop games. Markus liked working fast and, as a developer, having some degree