Saber Interactive’s chief creative officer, Tim Willits, spoke about the current state of AAA game developmentwondering in what other field do you fail if you sell less than 5 million copies. The veteran developer explained in an interview with IGN that many triple-A studios fill their games with stuff, without focusing on the core elements. According to him, one of the problems is that many try to follow trends and add things from the latest successful games, forgetting what really makes theirs fun.
Simplify
Saber believes that the critical element to take care of are the actions that the player repeats most often, on which he focuses most of his attention during development. Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, Saber’s latest titlehas its own unique features, like swarms, but nothing particularly revolutionary. The developers’ goal was simply to do everything very well and make the basic elements fun.
Willits also believes that “great games will always be successful” regardless of market trends or the evolution of certain genres.
One of the widespread problems in the industry, which Willits acknowledges, are increasing development costswhich make it increasingly difficult for publishers to recover the investments made. For this reason Saber seeks to optimize costs and keep its production process as sustainable as possible. Willits, who comes from id Software, noted that Space Marine 2’s budget is less than half that of Doom Eternal.
“We don’t need to sell four million units to make Space Marine 2 a success. There are many games, unfortunately, especially from North American developers, that if they don’t sell at least five million copies they have failed. I mean, what industry are we in, Where do we fail if we sell less than five million?”
Willits named other Saber projects, such as SnowRunner and World War Z, as examples of reasonably budgeted games that focus on doing their core elements very well: “Look at SnowRunner! It’s literally driving trucks through mud,” he said. explained. “That’s it, I’m done. I just described the whole game. 15 million people have played it because the experience is perfect.”
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