It appears that August is the month for having thoughts on the success of immersive sims! Earlier this month, one of the original designers behind Thief: The Dark Project shared his feelings on developing imsims at triple-A scale, coming to the conclusion it doesn’t really work. Just yesterday, Arkane veteran and Dishonored director Harvey Smith revealed his new studio that’s entirely dedicated to the genre. And now, Smith, alongside fellow leads at the new studio Ben Horne and Ricardo Bare, answers the evergreen question: are imsims dead?
Speaking to The Game Business, Smith responds with a question of his own, asking, “At some point you’re worried… do questions like that create a self-fulfilling prophecy?” He continues, “If you look back through those games, there are a lot of titles that people still talk about 10 or 20 years later. They have a lot of cultural cachet. And there are a few, if you look at BioShock or Deus Ex or Dishonored, that make a lot of money.”
Horne weighed in on the topic too, making note of how there are so many people out there with a broad taste in genres, making it hard to always nail down what to look towards. “We don’t really know what turn the industry might take, and we’re probably not going to be very good at trend chasing. And so, our best shot is to rally around a creative vision that excites us as developers,” he said. “It excites the audience that we know wants to play this kind-of game. That’s the best chance of making something great.”
I find one line from Smith particularly baffling, not because of what he says, but of what’s been said to him: “Very well-paid people say things to me, going way back now, like, ‘First-person games don’t sell,’ or, ‘RPGs are a niche market,’ ‘If you’re not working on a free-to-play game now, in five years you’ll be out of a job,’ ‘MMOs are the future,’ ‘In the future, games will have live motion video sections with Hollywood actors in them.’ I’ve heard smart, good people, friends of mine in executive positions, say these things over the years, and sometimes they’re right. But what Ben said, going back to what you love with a strong vision, that often comes through for us, so that’s what we have got to do.”
The bit I’m focusing on there is “first-person games don’t sell,” as if the first-person shooter does not exist and often sell buckets in many contexts. Though, to be fair, we are seeing a lot more Hollywood actors, so they got that part right. I’m mostly just encouraged to hear that Smith and co are focusing on what they’re most interested in, and hope they’re able to find an audience for that. There clearly is still a hunger for immersive sims, those that play Gloomwood appear to be plenty passionate for it. It’s just another one of those situations where you need to design with the right scale in mind. And for the immersive sim, perhaps that’s just small.
