In the last few weeks, there has been an increasing number of big flops in huge gaming productions. Companies like Sony and Ubisoft undertake large projects costing hundreds of millions of US dollars, but they fail. Games like Concord, Suicide Squad or Star Wars Outlaws fall short of expectations. Studios like Ubisoft are in crisis. But one game was recently successful, Warhammer 40k: Space Marine 2.
This is what the creative director of Space Marine 2 says: In an interview with IGN, Chief Creative Officer Tim Willis talks about the current crisis in AAA gaming.
Willis says the problem isn’t, as some believe, that AAA games take so long in development that they appear at release in genres that are no longer trendy, such as the brutally flopped hero shooter Concord.
He says: Some AAA games totally overdo it with features and scope. The new AAA games are far too large.
With Space Marine 2 they focused on the core of the game and always kept the scope of the game in mind. That’s why they were even praised for making Space Marine 2 feel like an action game from the Xbox 360 era again.
HandOfBlood also had fun with the shooter:
Twitch: For Space Marine 2, HandofBlood puts on a special outfit
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Space Marine 2 represents full focus on the gameplay loop
This is the crucial thing for him: Willis says you need to focus on the “core gameplay loop,” the process you repeat over and over again in a game:
It’s not necessarily the genre that has evolved, because great games will always sell well. One of the things we try to do at Saber […] is the belief that what you do every second and what happens when you press those buttons and that core gameplay loop is so crucial. So we focus on the interaction between each moment of the game and the feeling you get.
And then we stick to our core pillars: Be the ultimate Space Marine, melee, ranged, swarms, that’s it. Many teams overload their games during development. They look at another game that just came out and say, ‘Oh, we have to do this, we have to add this, we have to do that’. In doing so, they lose sight of what’s important, namely what makes the game truly entertaining.
We do in Space Marine 2 […] not a revolutionary new game mechanic that no one has ever seen before. There are game mechanics that people are familiar with, but we do them really, really well. And we execute them very, very well.
Sales expectations are unattainably high for overloaded games
This is the advantage of the system: Because Space Marine 2 has a common thread and follows it clearly, the budget was kept manageable, explains Willis. Then you don’t have to achieve completely exaggerated sales figures in order to make a profit.
Willis says: Many games being developed in North America, especially in California, would need to sell 5 million games to avoid being a flop.
What business are you in that you’re told, “You’re a failure if you don’t sell 5 million games.”
Space Marine 2 had about half the budget of Doom Eternal. For Space Marine 2 to be a success, it simply didn’t have to sell as many games as other games, Willis explains.
This is what lies behind it: The philosophy can be summarized as “Do little, but do what you do perfectly.” Some of the best snacks in the world work in a similar way, where there is only one dish, but it is worked out to perfection.
Apparently the “main course” in gaming is the gameplay loop, i.e. the actual gameplay that repeats itself endlessly.
We talked about one of the big flops that inspired the statement by the creative director of Space Marien 2 in an analysis at MeinMMO at the beginning of September: Why did Concord fail so badly on Steam and PS5 and why did Sony spend $250 million for one woke catastrophe burnt?