Quite a few developers have in recent times suggested that development costs involved in making video games have increased by a huge margin. This has predictably made it more difficult for some developers to make the games they really want to. Remedy Entertainment is one such company who are adapting to the market and they recently spoke to GamesIndustry.biz about their work and the industry as a whole.
Their newest game is simply dubbed Project 7 for now and is going to be a cinematic third-person action game with “the deepest game mechanics yet in a Remedy game.” The Company’s Head of Communications Thomas Puha shared some of the frustrations involved in creating single-player games and he stated, “There’s the crazy part of making a game where it takes four or five years, and then the game is over [for the player] in like a weekend. From a creative perspective, even when we made Alan Wake, it was like we spent all this time creating the characters, the universe, the rules and everything. It’s a place where you want the player to spend a longer period of time, and that’s hard to do in the traditional single-player space.”
Puha then went on to discuss how the costs of making AAA single-players titles is a lot more expensive than it used to be: “The reality is the traditional AAA single-player experience is just really expensive to make. The expectation level from gamers is really high in terms of how long the game is, what sort of features it has, how good the production values are. All those things are very expensive to do. And if you go back 10 years, you could still say the console market is roughly the same size. In the end, the audience you’re selling to is relatively the same size but the cost of making the game is ten-fold these days. So that’s an obvious problem.” This is certainly a noticeable problem as developers have less room to make mistakes and players have high expectations for new games.
All in all, the company is making some changes to keep up with the growing trends in the market and hopefully, Project 7 ends up being the game they have in their minds.
