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Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 Dev Says Big Budget Games Are Failing in Part Because Teams Are Over-Scoping Their Projects - IGN
Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 dev Tim Willits explains why the game was able to achieve massive success when so many big budget games have failed lately.
A lot of games are released with high budgets, and they're not selling nearly as well as expected.
Willits has his own theory on what’s happening. Speaking to IGN, Willits said that the problem isn’t necessarily that triple-A games take too long to develop and thus launch into already abandoned genres. Rather, Willits believes, triple-A developers are tending to “over-scope” their games, which in turn means they fail to do any one thing brilliantly.
For Space Marine 2, Willits explained, Saber made sure to nail the core combat and kept a handle on the scope of the game, so much so that some have praised it for rekindling memories of the Xbox 360 era of action games.
“It is not necessarily the genre that has moved on, because great games will always do well,” Willits insisted. “One of the things that we try to do at Saber, and this is part of my job as creative officer of all the teams, we have a core belief that what you do every second and what happens when you push these buttons and that core gameplay loop is so critical. So we focus on the moment-to-moment interaction in the gameplay and the feeling you have.
“And then we adhere to our core pillars, like be the ultimate Space Marine, melee, ranged, swarms, that's it. And a lot of teams throughout development will over-scope games. They look at some other game that just came out and say, ‘oh, we got to do that, let's add this, we got to do this.’ And they lose focus on the core, what actually makes the game fun.
“We are not in Space Marine 2 doing things that… well, the swarms are new technology, but there isn't some revolutionary new gameplay mechanic that no one's ever seen before. There are gameplay mechanics that people are familiar with, but we do it really, really well. And we execute really, really well.”
What business are we in where you fail if you sell less than five million?
“We don't need to sell four million units to make it [Space Marine 2] a success,” Willits said. “There are many games, sadly, especially out of North American developers, where if you do not sell five million copies you are a failure. I mean, what business are we in where you fail if you sell less than five million?”
He continued: “There are examples like that, and we do not want to be that business. We want to be a developer that focuses on the core experience, what makes the games actually fun, and then do it really well and then make it affordably.
“Look at SnowRunner! Dude, SnowRunner is literally driving trucks through mud. That's it, I'm done. I just described the game. 15 million people played it because the experience is perfect. Look at World War Z. Like, come on, we're not going to get an Academy Award for that game, but 25 million people have played it because it's just this perfectness, and that's what we do well.”
