Starbreeze is one of the most famous Swedish game studios. It became popular after the successful releases of games like The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay and Dark Athena, The Darkness, Payday and Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons.
The latter in particular won the Best Game Innovation Award at 2014's British Academy Games Awards (BAFTA). However, it was also Starbreeze's very last single player game and it looks like that might be true for quite a while yet.
Speaking to fellow developers in Dubrovnik's Reboot Develop 2017 yesterday, Global Brand Director Almir Listo openly said that Starbreeze would rather focus on developing co-op multiplayer games from now on while staying in a publishing role for single player games.
You need to find the thing that makes it replayable. One of the problems that Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons had for sure was that it's not replayable. It's a beautiful story, but it ends. And as many lovely emails as we've received about that game, it doesn't pay salaries.
Payday, however, because the game is replayable like few other games, it allowed us to continue pushing out content for the game, which allowed us to keep monetizing the players who were interested in the game.
We're great at doing co-op games and multiplayer games. That's why The Walking Dead game we're making is a co-op game, that's why the Crossfire game we're making is a co-op game. We want to focus on that, and leave the single player games to people like you.
The question of whether Starbreeze would ever do another single player game? Yeah, but we'd rather have another studio approach us with a beautiful idea. We want to focus on what we're good at now, which is co-op games, but feel free to approach us. We're interested in all kinds of deals.
Honestly, I'd argue that they earned more critical acclaim with single player games. Still, it's undeniable that Starbreeze is becoming a publishing powerhouse after signing titles like System Shock 3 and Psychonauts 2 (not to mention RAID: World War II, Dead by Daylight and Deliver Us The Moon).
Payday 2 is also coming to the Nintendo Switch, where it will likely sell very well given that there is nothing quite like it on the platform yet. Payday 3 is still far from release, but we should learn more about OVERKILL's The Walking Dead in the coming months since the co-op FPS set in the world created by Robert Kirkman is still set for a Q4 2017 release.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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