One tragedy about the fall of Arkane Austin—aside from Microsoft’s seeming unwillingness to give studios a chance beyond the next quarter—is the pervasive feeling that the studio, whose devs were previously known for their immersive sims, was forced to make something way outside of their wheelhouse. Redfall was a live service shooter, and a pretty cruddy one at that.
So it might be buoying news to hear that Dishonored co-creator Harvey Smith and seasoned Arkane vet Ben Horne’s new studio isn’t going to try and chase down trends. In an interview with The Game Business, Horne and Smith were asked if they thought the immersive sim (which Black Pony Immersive has been strangely careful to talk around), is a dead or dying genre.
“If you look back through those games,” says Smith, “There are a lot of titles that people still talk about 10 or 20 years later. They have a lot of cultural cachet. And there are a few, if you look at BioShock or Deus Ex or Dishonored, that make a lot of money.”
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Part of the issue, as many developers have outlined, is the general ballooning budgets in the industry itself: “If you look at Dishonored, for instance, the budget that we were working with was… I wouldn’t say tiny, many triple-I developers would envy that budget, but it was very reasonable. And our [return on investment] was four or five times the total spend.”
For Horne’s part, one of the mission statements of Black Pony Immersive is to get away from tend chasing—which Arkane was clearly and famously bad at—and just make stuff its developers would like to play:
“The industry is growing in such a way that there are a large amount of players with a really varied appetite. We don’t really know what turn the industry might take, and we’re probably not going to be very good at trend chasing. And so, our best shot is to rally around a creative vision that excites us as developers. It excites the audience that we know wants to play this kind-of game. That’s the best chance of making something great.”
Smith concurs, outlining the (understandably cynical) perspective that, hey, he’s heard a lot of these promises from big executives before: “Very well-paid people say things to me, going way back now, like, ‘First-person games don’t sell,’ or, ‘RPGs are a niche market,’ ‘If you’re not working on a free-to-play game now, in five years you’ll be out of a job,’ ‘MMOs are the future,’ ‘In the future, games will have live motion video sections with Hollywood actors in them.”
If we skim through that list, we can see a lot of nonsense. First-person games have continued to sell, one of the most successful games of the decade was an RPG based on Dungeons & Dragons, and live-service free to play games have been an absolute trashfire for some publishers, even with deep wallets. And while Hollywood actors are in videogames now, they’re not in live action.
“I’ve heard smart, good people,” Smith continues, “friends of mine in executive positions, say these things over the years, and sometimes they’re right. But what Ben said, going back to what you love with a strong vision, that often comes through for us, so that’s what we have got to do.”