Finland’s gaming industry is usually discussed in terms of mobile hits: Supercell’s Clash of Clans, Rovio’s Angry Birds, the kind of titles that rack up billions of downloads. Less discussed, but arguably more interesting, is what Finnish studios have done on PC and console. Here, the country hasn’t chased volume so much as reputation. A handful of studios, Remedy Entertainment above all, have spent three decades building games that critics and players return to years after release. Four titles capture that trajectory best.
Cities: Skylines
Released in 2015 by Colossal Order, a small studio based in Tampere, Cities: Skylines arrived at a moment when city-building fans had largely given up on the genre after a disappointing SimCity reboot. The gap it filled turned out to be enormous. Published by Paradox Interactive, the game had sold more than 12 million copies across all platforms by mid-2022, making it one of the best-selling simulation games ever made. A sequel, Cities: Skylines II, followed in 2023 and had passed one million units sold by the end of that year despite a rocky technical launch.
Part of what kept the original game alive for so long was its modular DLC structure, which let players build out increasingly specific systems rather than just bigger maps. The After Dark expansion added a Casino as a unique building, unlockable once a district reaches 5,000 cells of leisure-zoned commercial space and a population threshold in the thousands. Once built, it functions as one of the more efficient income generators in the game, drawing tourist spending into a single high-value structure rather than spreading it thin across ordinary shops and hotels. It’s a small mechanic in a very large simulation, but it mirrors something true outside the game too: Finnish players researching real foreign casinos tend to search for terms like uudet ulkomaisten kasinoiden when comparing operators, since domestic licensing has historically covered only a narrow slice of what’s actually available to them under EU rules.
Max Payne
Long before Cities: Skylines, Remedy Entertainment had already put Finland on the map. Founded in Espoo in 1995 by a group of former demoscene programmers from Future Crew, the studio’s first commercial release was the racing shooter Death Rally before it turned toward something far more ambitious.
Max Payne, released in 2001, introduced “bullet time” to a mainstream audience and wrapped a fairly conventional shooter in a genuinely noir-inflected script, something few games of the era attempted seriously. It sold well enough that Take-Two Interactive acquired the entire Max Payne brand from Remedy in 2002 for $10 million in cash plus roughly $24 million in stock, a deal that was unusual at the time for handing over a full IP rather than just publishing rights. Remedy still developed the 2003 sequel alongside Rockstar before stepping away from the franchise entirely; Rockstar Studios later produced Max Payne 3 on its own in 2012. Across all three entries, the series had sold over 7.5 million copies combined by 2011, respectable numbers for a series built more on style and voice than mass-market accessibility.
What Max Payne really did was establish a house style Remedy has never really abandoned: flawed, monologuing protagonists, tight scripting, and gunplay treated as a storytelling tool rather than the whole point.
Alan Wake and Alan Wake 2
After parting ways with the Max Payne IP, Remedy spent years developing an original property. Alan Wake, released in 2010, followed a novelist whose horror manuscript starts manifesting in reality around him, an idea that was ambitious for its time but arrived on the tail end of the Xbox 360’s life cycle and never quite broke through commercially in the way Remedy hoped.
The sequel took thirteen years to arrive, and the wait paid off differently than the sales figures for the original might have predicted. Alan Wake 2, released in October 2023 and co-published with Epic Games, split its structure between two playable protagonists and leaned fully into survival horror rather than the action-adventure hybrid of the first game. At The Game Awards 2023, it was nominated in eight categories and won three: Best Game Direction, Best Narrative, and Best Art Direction, losing the overall Game of the Year prize to Baldur’s Gate 3 but outperforming far bigger-budget competitors like Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 across the individual categories. For a studio of Remedy’s size, going up against Larian and Insomniac and taking home more wins than either is a fairly rare outcome.
Control
Control, released in 2019, sits between the other two in terms of both budget and ambition. Built around the Federal Bureau of Control, a fictional US agency managing supernatural anomalies, the game combined telekinetic combat with a brutalist, shifting architecture that became one of its most discussed features. It was made on a comparatively modest €30 million development budget and still managed to punch well above its weight critically.
The awards tally reflects that:
Recognition Control received
- 11 nominations at the 2020 BAFTA Games Awards, the joint-highest count that year alongside Death Stranding
- Game of the Year honors from outlets including IGN, Ars Technica, Game Informer, and GamesRadar+
- Six wins at the NAVGTR Awards, the most of any title that year
Commercially, Remedy’s own CEO was candid that Control hadn’t been a blockbuster by industry standards, but the numbers grew steadily rather than spiking and fading. By 2021 the studio reported over 10 million people had played the game, largely through Xbox Game Pass, and direct sales alone had passed 3 million copies with revenues exceeding €92 million within a few years of release. That long tail turned Control into a franchise in its own right, with a sequel now in development.
The pattern underneath these four games
What’s striking across Cities: Skylines, Max Payne, Alan Wake, and Control isn’t a shared genre or even a shared studio, since only three of the four came from Remedy. It’s that none of them competed on volume. Finland’s mobile giants built empires on downloads measured in the billions; its PC and console studios built reputations on review scores, award nominations, and games that critics still reference as reference points years later. Remedy in particular has leaned into this identity deliberately, treating cinematic storytelling as a competitive advantage rather than a cost centre, and it’s paid off in a form of success that doesn’t always show up cleanly in unit sales but is hard to miss in how often these titles get cited as some of the best the medium has produced.