Avalanche Boss Stefanía Halldórsdóttir Becomes Nordisk Games CEO, Keeping Both Jobs
- The people running Avalanche Studios Group, the Swedish studio behind Just Cause and theHunter: Call of the Wild, now also run the company that owns it.
- Neither is leaving Avalanche.
- Halldórsdóttir has led Avalanche since August 2023, according to her biography on the Nordisk Games team page.
The people running Avalanche Studios Group, the Swedish studio behind Just Cause and theHunter: Call of the Wild, now also run the company that owns it. Nordisk Games named Stefanía Halldórsdóttir as its CEO and Ásgeir Kröyer as its CFO on November 2, 2026, effective the same day, according to the company’s announcement.
Neither is leaving Avalanche. Both keep their jobs as CEO and CFO of the studio and will lead the wider group alongside it from Stockholm. Their new reach goes well beyond Just Cause: Nordisk Games also wholly owns Supermassive Games, the studio that made Until Dawn and The Quarry.
From EVE Online to Just Cause
Halldórsdóttir has led Avalanche since August 2023, according to her biography on the Nordisk Games team page. The page credits her with the best commercial year in theHunter: Call of the Wild’s history. The appointment announcement goes further, saying Avalanche “has delivered its strongest years in the studio’s history and enters 2027 ahead of plan.”
Her games career started at CCP in Iceland, the EVE Online studio that now goes by Fenris Creations. The team page says she began there in game design and production and finished as general manager, leading the company’s virtual reality work from Shanghai along the way.
She then spent time outside games. She ran Eyrir Vöxtur, a venture fund, and was an executive vice president at Landsvirkjun, Iceland’s national power company, before joining Avalanche. None of this background appears in the appointment release itself.
Her finance chief has a mixed background too. Kröyer joined Avalanche as CFO in 2024. His team-page profile lists eight years at Maritech in Halifax, Canada, ending as chief technical officer, and nearly eight years in corporate finance at Arion Bank in Reykjavík.
Before Avalanche, he was CFO of PayAnalytics, an Icelandic pay equity software company. There is one small mismatch in Nordisk’s own material: the team page says he became the group’s CFO in October 2026, while the release gives November 2 as the start date for both roles.
The games now under her watch
Nordisk Games, founded in 2016, is part of Nordisk Film and the wider Egmont group. The release says it wholly owns two studios and holds investments in others. Here is how the group lines up, based on the release and the studio list on Nordisk’s website:
| Studio | Nordisk’s stake | Games players know it for |
|---|---|---|
| Avalanche Studios Group (Stockholm and Malmö) | Wholly owned | Just Cause series, theHunter: Call of the Wild, Mad Max, Rage 2, Generation Zero, Call of the Wild: The Angler |
| Supermassive Games | Wholly owned | Until Dawn, The Dark Pictures Anthology, The Quarry, Directive 8020 |
| Star Stable Entertainment | Investment | Star Stable, the online horse-riding adventure game |
| MercurySteam (Madrid) | Investment | Castlevania: Lords of Shadow series, Metroid: Samus Returns |
Supermassive’s list comes from the studio’s own website, which describes it as best known for Until Dawn, The Dark Pictures Anthology and The Quarry. The Avalanche titles are those named in the announcement.
Three and a half years with a stand-in at the top
Nordisk Games has been run by an interim CEO since spring 2023. In April that year, CEO Mikkel Weider left by mutual agreement after leading the company since 2016, Game Developer reported. Allan Mathson Hansen, CEO of Nordisk Film, took the games job as well while a search went on.
That interim spell ran from April 2023 to November 2026, about three and a half years. Hansen now becomes chair of Nordisk Games and returns his day-to-day focus to Nordisk Film. In the release, he said that the more time he spent understanding the studios, “the clearer it became that the answer was already here.”
A hard stretch for both big studios
The new leaders take over after a difficult period at both wholly owned studios. In August 2025, Contraband, the open-world game Avalanche was making for Microsoft, was reported to be no longer in active development. TheSixthAxis noted at the end of that September that the game had not been officially cancelled.
On September 30, 2025, Avalanche proposed closing its Liverpool studio and cutting staff in Malmö and Stockholm. It confirmed on November 19 that Liverpool had closed and that it had parted ways with 31 people, PSU reported.
Supermassive released its sci-fi horror game Directive 8020 on May 12, 2026, according to its Steam page. In late June, Nordisk announced that Supermassive CEO Robert Henrysson was stepping down, with Graeme Law named interim head, Wccftech reported.
Avalanche is taking over Supermassive’s publishing
The two studios were tied together before this appointment. On October 8, Nordisk announced that Avalanche would take over global publishing, marketing and distribution for Supermassive’s games, starting with Directive 8020. The deal also shares finance, people and IT support between them.
Nordisk said both studios stay fully independent on the creative side, keeping ownership of their games, creative direction and development roadmaps. When we checked on November 2, Directive 8020’s Steam listing still named Supermassive Games as both developer and publisher.
In the appointment announcement, Halldórsdóttir echoed that promise. “Our studios lead their games creatively,” she said, “and everything we do as an owner is in service of that work.”