TL;DR: 007 First Light wasn’t only a Danish achievement. IO Interactive’s five-year-old Malmö studio in Sweden contributed alongside Copenhagen, working on the Glacier engine, 007 First Light, and Project Fantasy. It’s the latest milestone for the Öresund games region — a cross-border Denmark–Sweden corridor CEO Hakan Abrak once called a potential “epicentre of game development in Scandinavia.” And with Sweden alone hitting SEK 37 billion in 2024 games revenue, the Nordics built the year’s biggest Bond game on top of one of the world’s strongest gaming ecosystems.

Why is 007 First Light considered a Nordic game?

007 is built by a cross-border Danish-Swedish team. While IO Interactive’s headquarters sits in Copenhagen, the studio has run a fully operational Malmö office since 2019, as reported by MCV/DEVELOP. At launch, CEO Hakan Abrak described the expansion as a “natural choice” given Malmö’s existing video game industry, and added that he believed the city had “all opportunities to become the epicentre of game development in Scandinavia.”

The two studios sit roughly 35 minutes apart by train across the Øresund Bridge — close enough that Copenhagen and Malmö function less like a Danish company with a Swedish branch and more like a single team distributed across two cities and two countries.

What does IOI Malmö do on 007 First Light?

According to IO Interactive’s own careers page, IOI Malmö opened in 2019 and has since contributed to HITMAN 3, HITMAN: World of Assassination, and Freelancer mode — and like every IOI studio, Malmö is actively working on all the company’s current projects, including 007 First Light and the original fantasy RPG codenamed Project Fantasy.

In a 2024 interview marking the studio’s fifth anniversary, as covered by Invest in Skåne, Studio Manager Sandra Smedegaard Mondahl confirmed Malmö has had “an impact on both Project 007, Project Fantasy, our Glacier engine, and beyond.” In other words: the Swedish office has had its hands on the new Bond game, the studio’s next original IP, and the proprietary tech powering both — not a satellite outpost but a co-creator.

Why are the Nordics a global gaming powerhouse?

Because almost every Nordic country has now become a serious games exporter, and Sweden has become the headline act.

The Swedish games industry generated approximately SEK 37 billion (~€3.5B / $3.8B) in 2024, up 6.8% year-on-year and accounting for around 3% of Sweden’s service exports, as reported by Nordic Game citing the official Dataspelsbranschen industry report. The country counts roughly 9,130 game industry employees across 1,101 companies, with 23.5% women in the workforce — and Stockholm alone hosts 464 studios, with another 146 in Skåne (the region Malmö belongs to) and 156 in Västra Götaland, as covered by WN Hub.

Beyond IO Interactive, the Nordic studio roll-call reads like a “best of the last 20 years” list. Sweden alone is home to EA DICE (Battlefield), Massive Entertainment (The Division, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora), Mojang (Minecraft), Avalanche Studios (Just Cause), MachineGames (Wolfenstein, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle), Paradox Interactive, King (Candy Crush), and Embracer Group. Finland has Remedy Entertainment (Alan Wake, Control) and Supercell (Clash of Clans). Denmark has IO Interactive itself, plus Playdead (Limbo, Inside).

It’s a small region punching well above its weight — and 007 First Light is the latest, loudest example.

What makes Malmö specifically a gaming hub?

Three things: a deep talent pool, a tight ecosystem, and the Øresund region’s cross-border dynamics.

Mondahl has been explicit about why IO chose Malmö. The decision, she told Invest in Skåne, came from “the huge local talent pool” — the schools, the established studios, and Game Habitat, Malmö’s games industry community organization. Beyond IOI Malmö, the city houses Massive Entertainment (Ubisoft’s Swedish flagship), Tarsier Studios (Little Nightmares), and Simogo (Sayonara Wild Hearts, Device 6), among others. King also operates a Malmö office.

That density matters. As reported by MCV/DEVELOP, the city’s gaming community has built genuine momentum around shared talent, multicultural hiring, and an unusual level of inter-studio cooperation for a city its size. Mondahl has called Skåne’s lifestyle pull — work-life balance, nature, food, bike-friendly geography — a real recruiting advantage, especially for international hires.

In Game Centralen’s home country, the Malmö story is the clearest local-pride case study for what Sweden’s games industry can be when it gets the talent flywheel right.

What does 007 First Light mean for the Nordic games industry?

Two things. First, it’s the loudest possible advertisement that Nordic studios can build and self-publish AAA games on licensed global IP — not just the indie and live-service hits the region is already famous for. Second, it lands at exactly the moment Nordic gaming is attracting fresh institutional capital.

In February 2025, the European Investment Fund pledged up to €20 million to Sweden-based venture fund Behold Ventures, specifically to back early-stage game developers across Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. Behold has already invested in 18 studios across the region and is targeting up to 23, with the EIF backing helping it scale toward a SEK 500 million target.

Put differently: the same week 007 First Light topped review charts as the highest-rated James Bond game in decades, Europe was actively wiring more money into the next generation of Nordic studios trying to follow IO’s path.

For Swedish, Danish, Finnish and Norwegian developers — and for any publisher or investor looking at the region — the message is the same. The Nordics aren’t a side story in the global games industry anymore. With IO Interactive’s Copenhagen-Malmö axis pulling off the year’s biggest single-player launch, they’re a centerpiece.

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