Remedy Entertainment is known for its strange games that sometimes don’t sell too well. The studio’s new CEO, former EA executive Jean-Charles Gaudechon, spoke about the company’s various projects in an interview with The Game Business and discussed his plans to ensure that the studio sells more of its games going forward.
Discussing his previous tenure at Electronic Arts, Gaudechon spoke about understanding the fear that fans of Remedy’s works may have about whether this will end up turning the studio into something like EA. However, he said that his appointment as the studio’s new CEO happened because he knows “exactly what Remedy is,” and how the studio needs to be supported.
“There’s been a lot [of talk] about EA,” Gaudechon said. “What does it mean to have someone that has been spent time at EA? And I completely understand the fear of, ‘is he going to bring methods that work for a massive company and crush the soul of a studio like Remedy?’
“But I think I got chosen because I know exactly what Remedy is. And what needs to be protected, needs to be supported and needs to be grown. Remedy is one-of-a-kind. It’s a studio that has amazing creative drive. It’s a studio that also has been messy here or there, and that’s the beauty of the type of games that were made and how. What I hope I can bring to Remedy is vision on where the company could go and where we could make some improvements.”
“Who am I to change the DNA of a 30-year successful game studio?”
He spoke about the love and respect that Remedy has already garnered from its fans thanks to games like Alan Wake 2 and Control, and recounted getting messages from his friends telling him, “We love Remedy so much. Don’t f*** it up.”
“That shows you how much people love Remedy,” he said.
“Remedy is already one of the biggest game authors, with very strong signature products,” he continued. “Now, after seeing it from the inside, there’s so much more we can give in terms of super-strong authored, creative, crazy stories and gameplay. Honestly, we haven’t achieved half of the potential in terms of the products that we make.”
As for his plans for the studio, he wants to continue on the path that had already been set by Remedy Entertainment before his appointment as CEO. This means looking at how the various IPs owned by the studios can be turned into franchises.
“[Our deal with] Annapurna goes into making our games, our franchises shine further and reach an audience that doesn’t exist today,” he explained. “It’s a pity, I think Alan Wake should have sold more. Control should have sold more. To me, that’s one of the first things we need to fix, even before trying to make more games to a certain extent. First of all, maximize the potential of the ones we have, because they’re incredible. And cross-media is going to help us do that.”
Gaudechon also spoke about one of the biggest elephants in the room when it comes to discussing the gaming industry’s future – the use of generative AI. He noted that, while the studio is being “extremely cautious and not embracing AI clearly,” he sees the potential for AI tools to be useful in earlier stages of development and prototyping. While there won’t be a top-down mandate to force the use of AI tools, he also won’t block any of the developers from using AI where they think it might help.
“My stance is that AI is not going to make things cheaper, and it’s not going to make things cheaper for a pretty long time,” he said. “People thinking, ‘Oh, we can now make games cheaper with this’, I have big question marks around that. And what types of games, by the way? I said this during the earnings call, good luck trying to do Alan Wake 2 with AI. Try to use Genie and do that, and we’ll see where you land.”
“But we’ve always been an R&D studio. It’s always dabbling with tech stuff. So, I’m not going to block people from doing so. But we’re going to be extremely cautious on that, never getting anywhere close to creative and anywhere close to user-facing.”
Remedy is currently working on Control Resonant, which will come to PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S. There has been no announcement of a release date yet.