Skyrim’s Success Proves Story-Based Games Are Popular, Alan Wake Dev Says

Remedy Entertainment, the developer of the recent Alan Wake series, believes that story-based games can become quite successful, citing Bethesda’s extremely popular The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim RPG as proof.

Skyrim was released last year right between big video games like Battlefield 3, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 or Uncharted 3, all shooters with multiplayer modes.

Despite this, the RPG from Bethesda sold extremely well, managing to become the most popular title on services like Steam.

This proves that story-based games can still impress lots of players, at least according to Remedy Entertainment’s head of franchise development Oskari Hakkinen.

"The Call of Dutys and the Battlefields are doing extremely well in the US. Those are the type of games that are in popular demand, so it's really positive to see Skyrim and other RPG games that have a lot of story in be successful as well,” Hakkinen told Eurogamer. "It gives us motivation to do story-driven games, because there's obviously an audience out there of people who enjoy story as well."

Remedy’s previous game, Alan Wake, featured a complex story with survival horror elements even if it was still a shooter at heart. While the daunting narrative may have drove some gamers off, it still became quite popular on the Xbox 360 and, more recently, on the PC.

"Seeing something like that being successful, we don't need to consciously try to make our stories any less than they are, not try to make them any simpler. Our stories are not necessarily complicated, but our games are very story heavy. And, just to see games like Skyrim succeed, it's like, let's not try to make it any less story-heavy."

"That's our thing. It's in our DNA," Hakkinen added. "We always want to take the story-telling in video games forward. Let's continue to do that and not try to make any simpler stories."

Remedy’s newest title, Alan Wake’s American Nightmare, still features a complex story, but also has a special cooperative Fight ‘til Dawn mode, in order to attract more Xbox 360 owners.