Frequently Asked Questions

Mainframe

When was Mainframe founded, and by whom?

Mainframe is an independent, venture-backed game developer founded in the spring of 2019 by 13 game industry veterans, mainly from CCP and Remedy. The studio aims to create the first open-world, massively multiplayer online game (MMO) built from the ground up for cloud gaming networks.

Our mission is to create a virtual world that millions will live in for decades.

Do you all work in Finland or Iceland, then?

We do have offices in Finland, Iceland, and France. Still, some team members are spread worldwide and working from Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Estonia, and even Australia! We have 17 nationalities represented at Mainframe.

For us, the most important thing is that people work from where they are most productive, which can mean working remotely.

When does the team meet then if you work remotely?

Mainframers in Helsinki, Reykjavik, and Paris meet regularly in their respective offices and try to share a weekly lunch. There are weekly online team meetings where everyone joins and shares company information and updates.

The game teams occasionally meet to workshop and plan together in one of our offices.

We also gather the whole Mainframe team once per year in a big summit, mixing workshops and fun activities to keep the team spirit and get to know each other better. We also gather to celebrate our milestones - whether online or offline - as we recently did for the announcement of Pax Dei.

What’s the background of Mainframers?

We started with 13 founders from Finland and Iceland who represented all game development disciplines. Now (May 2023), we represent 17 different nationalities and a (super) wide variety of skills needed to develop an MMORPG.

Our current team consists primarily of Engineers, Designers, and Artists, but we also have a Publishing team, Producers, and people taking care of running the company. We are a small team considering the challenging vision we want to deliver to gamers, but we can do it. To keep the team small, we try to find ways to do things smartly, and we have also hired mostly people with seniority and extensive expertise and experience. We hope that in the future, we will be able to mentor more developers at the start of their journey with the game industry.

How is life in the Mainframe office?

We are an online community at Mainframe. We are spread in several locations and split into teams (each team is developing a specific aspect of the game - the world, combat, the crafting...). Members of any feature team may come from any location. Our teams have come up with their own way of working together in the past three years. Because our work happens mostly online, our use of offices is finding its way. Our offices in Helsinki, Reykjavik, and Paris are centrally located and support everyone who wishes to work there with good / plenty of coffee and excellent company.

Diversity is a hot topic right now. What do you do as a company regarding diversity?

We take on team members based on their skills and merits - everyone on the team should feel they were hired because they were the best candidate for the position. Our team trusts each other, and we are very open in our plans and discussions. It is a balance of inviting everyone into the conversations and ensuring we all spend our work time on the most critical tasks for each of us. It is not always easy, but we constantly evolve in how we work by being honest with each other and dedicating effort to improving.

When we have a chance, we hire for diversity - meaning that we tweak the role a bit to get a wider pool of applicants.

Are you all gamers? What is your favorite type of game?

We are all gamers in our own way. Some of us play more on PC, some more on console, and others only play mobile games (thus why they don’t own a gaming PC…)! We also all have different tastes in terms of game genre, so overall, that makes a big potpourri of experiences - good and bad - that help us shape Pax Dei every day for the best.

When did you start working on the game?

The game's concept was in the founders' heads for quite some time, way before Mainframe was founded. We really started working on it in 2019 when we launched the studio and hired more people to make it a reality.

How many people are working on developing the game?

A bit more than sixty people are in our development teams (including artists, developers, UX, analytics, design, story, backend, etc.). We also have a dozen people in support teams handling accountability, human resources, publishing, and IT.

Can you give more details about who invested in your company?

You can find all the details in the press releases that were issued for our two rounds of funding: https://themainframe.com/en/media/

Looking at the pictures on your site (themainframe.com), you look like a bunch of old geeks… Are you all that old and that geek?

Funnily enough, the average experience in the gaming industry for the company is 15+ years… Are we old? It all depends on how you define “old”.😉 We prefer to say that we are experienced. And we want to put that experience into creating the game of a lifetime. Are we a bunch of geeks? Definitely! We all have our favorite universes and references, but we are definitely geeks, and proud of it!