14 DAY TRIAL // Developer Digital Extremes says that its Warframe free-to-play PC title was a smaller risk for the company than dropping home consoles and the PC in order to focus on mobile games, something that many middle-sized studios have done.
Steve Sinclair, a creative director at the company, tells GamesIdustry.biz that Digital Extremes was not willing to lose employees and appreciated the core gaming demographic that still uses the PC for its entertainment needs.
He states, “Internally, the studio was sharply divided on what we were doing, because we had worked and tried to do frankly high budget looking stuff for way less money. You get a call from an executive saying he just saw that Halo trailer and why don’t we have X,Y, and Z?”
He adds that most middle-sized studios are “are dead and gone, and the quadrupling down on a few franchises means that a mid-size developer like us that can’t throw 500 people on a single project don’t have any work.”
The video game industry has, in the last few years, become sharply divided between high-profile projects that get plenty of marketing backing from publishers and smaller games that often use free-to-play models or migrate to mobile devices.
Digital Extremes launched Warframe on the PC in late March and plenty of gamers have appreciated the core mechanics of the third-person shooter.
Since then the team has worked with Sony in order to also deliver the experience on the PlayStation 4 home console when it launches later in the year.
It’s unclear whether any extra content will be exclusively available on the new platform or whether cross platform play is in the works.
Sony has said that it wants to attract a wide variety of titles to its new console in order to make sure that all players have something to play on it.