The director of last year’s big heist hit, Payday 2, David Goldfarb, has announced he is resigning from studio Overkill software, in an attempt to move on from the traditional AAA industry, and focus on smaller game development.
“I have decided to move on,” Goldfarb told Polygon. “It’s all on good terms and I think they’re well positioned to succeed as the last Steam sale seems to indicate. They’re doing just fine. It’s just one of those things where I’ve been making games for a long time.”
“I knew that at some point the thing that I always wanted was to make my own thing. It doesn’t matter who I work with: the desire was never to make other people’s games, no matter how good they are,” he said. “I felt like I had done everything else. Payday 2 was a big success, the team did great. But for me I was like what am I doing here?”
“I’m abandoning AAA. Payday 2 wasn’t triple AAA but it had AAA sales. But I just want to find genres that I can subvert,” he continued. “To do that I can’t be working for people in the way that I was, I just don’t want any of that shit.”
He also clarified that he wasn’t going to be working on something like MOBAs, a genre that so many developers are now fleeing to. “I love role-playing games, so I will make one,” he said. “I never wanna really do [big teams] again. And there are a lot of reasons for that. Even when I was doing it it felt fucking fraudulent,” he said. “And there are people who are totally valid in that context but if you’re a journalist or a game designer who thinks the thing that matters the most to you is you need freedom, and I think I’m one of those people, then eventually the world will decide or you will decide, there is no other thing. It will happen one way or another.”
Well, good luck David, and hopefully you can create something you really want to, and that we can all enjoy.