summary
- Rising game development costs will lead studios to copy trends around innovation to maintain success.
- Arrowhead Boss Johan Pilestedt warns developers who are following the trends in favour of risk-taking.
- Pilentedt encourages studios to create unique games based on Studio Foundation rather than trending.
With game development costs rising to unsustainable levels in recent years, more and more studios are aiming to cash out what’s hot instead of offering a new experience.
Remember when most people promoted the Battle Royale game to recreate the success of Fortnite? This is not only concerning players, but even game developers. The boss of Arrowhead Game Studios is the developer behind the highly successful Hellidivers 2 and has something to say about the studio chasing live service games.
Helldivers2 Johan Pilestedt believes developers should take more risks
Speaking on the Game Developer Conference Panel (via PC Gamers), Arrowhead’s Johan Pilentedt talks about developers competing in the same niche.
“We always go through that cycle of death and rebirth, but now it’s not diversified enough, so that cycle is unnecessarily cruel. We’re playing more than ever before, so we need to make more types of games.
What’s interesting here is that game publishers often push developers to chase trends as “safe” bets, but we’ve seen how many of these types of games fail.
“One thing I can guarantee is that these safe bets are studio death sentences. We are in a risk-taking business. If we can’t take risks, we can’t achieve success.
Pilentedt ended his speech by not only taking risks but telling developers to do their own thing the same way they did. “Make your game according to the studio’s foundations and style. Don’t copy others. Think about what you want to make and gamble on it.”
Of course, that’s easier than that, but Pilentedt is important. Looking at the Battle Royale trends a few years ago, we see that the number of these “safe” bets have died less than a year later. Nowadays, developers have become a safe bet on live service games, but as you can see from many games that shut down due to lack of player interest, copying trending games is not only difficult to take players away from popular games, but future developments will end, so the game’s population will probably look at this new game and perhaps this new game.
