14 DAY TRIAL // David Goldfarb, the director of the cooperative shooter Payday 2, has announced that he is leaving Overkill Software in order to start an indie studio.
The designer has a 15-year history with game development on various AAA studios, having joined Swedish dev Overkill Software after working on Battlefield 3 and Mirror's Edge over at EA Digital Illusions CE.
He is now looking for the creative freedom that only going independent could offer him, and as such is intent on starting working on "his own thing" in his new Stockholm-based indie studio.
"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 tells Polygon.
Goldfarb is currently in the early stages of setting up his start-up business, his small studio only numbering four people for now. He has said that although the conceptual work has been in development for a couple of months, it's too early to tell where the work is going, for now.
"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. To do that I can't be working for people in the way that I was, I just don't want any of that [expletive]," he states.
"It's all on good terms and I think [Overkill] is well positioned to succeed. They're doing great. They'll continue to succeed as the last Steam sales indicate. Super smart people over there," Goldfarb shares.
He has pointed out that he wants to steer clear of the current trends in gaming, and that taking into account his love for role-playing games, he will probably make one of those.
"No MOBAs, no comic book styled art, no pixel art. Like, those are things I will not do. And there's nothing wrong with those things, those things are all awesome, I just don't want to do any of them," he says.
He explains that he doesn't want to ever be involved with big teams, for a multitude of reasons, but he cites his need for freedom as being the most prominent one.
Prior to his career in video game making, Goldfarb accumulated experience in both writing and poetry, and he now hopes to achieve the same level of creative freedom that he had as a solo artist, within the smaller team that he is now putting together.
"One thing I realised coming out of having written things like poetry and being some kind of writer before I entered the games industry was that for a long time, writing was a thing that allowed me to deal with whatever emotional release and connection you had to the world when I was doing those things."
"Then I made games sort of as a reaction to that because it's hard to live with that kind of intensity. And it made me really unhappy and it doesn't pay the bills. It became a thing where I was like 'I love games and they don't hurt me so maybe I should make games,'" Goldfarb concludes.