Bloober Team CEO Piotr Babieno can identify two turning points in the history of the Polish developer.
As he explains GamesIndustry.biz In a recent conversation, the first turning point came in 2014.
“We released Basement Crawl for the PS4 and, in fact, the game is very famous because it was the worst game on the PS4 at the time,” says Babieno. “I played a multiplayer game and the online multiplayer didn’t work properly.”
After restoring the game from scratch to fulfill its promises, Bloober Team reflected on his career as a studio.
“We realized in 2014 that we were working mostly on titles that were trying to catch other people and other teams that were successful,” says Babieno. “So we tried to do something that we personally would be proud of. We decided to focus on the genre that would be very close to ours [tastes]. “
The company has pivoted into psychological horror games, had success in Early Access with Layers of Fear, and has built a reputation since then with Observer, Layers of Fear 2, Blair Witch, and more recently for PC and Xbox Series X. | S exclusive The Environment.
Medium was, in fact, the first of those horror games designed by Bloober Team, but Babieno says it had to be reduced until more capable hardware was available to help achieve the team’s vision. Now that it has come out and the vision is fulfilled, Babieno says that 2021 marks a second turning point for the company.
“[Psychological horror] it’s still in our DNA, “says Babieno.” We would still like to have this taste for making games, but we would like to talk more about the action. Therefore, our future projects will be more from the perspective of the first person, such as The Medium. We will have much more advanced game mechanics. “
Medium is a “borderline project” for Bloober Team, which fits into the company’s old and new approach. Babieno says the studio plans to make “advanced AA games with AAA graphics and animation, but of course a little smaller.”
He adds: “In fact, we have been working for more than a year on another game project, another horror IP and we are doing this with a very famous game editor. I can’t tell you who. I can’t tell you what the project is, but I’m pretty sure that when people realize we’re working on it, they’ll be very happy. “
A series of horror franchises over the years have pivoted into action in a bid for wider acceptability and even when sales proved the thesis, they often proved controversial to fans in general.
“We’ve had this conversation for three years,” says Babieno. “Because we realized that we are in a niche and we would like to expand it into a niche. Our future projects will not necessarily be horror games. These could be called thrillers. I’m trying to do it in the future.
“If you think about Resident Evil 8, Hellblade 2, even in some respects The Last of Us … This is where we want to be. And yet we would like to keep our DNA, showing some fears and emotions, those things that are hidden from our eyes. But, again, we would like not to make the story our environment, but to have “real” stories with characters, action and so on. “
Babieno knows that some fans will be willing to check the future efforts of the Bloober team, simply based on the studio’s record at the moment, but clearly this will not be enough to stand out in a horror genre that not only does it grow, but it diversifies with innovative hits. such as four-player cooperative fascophobia.
“Of course we have a few core fans coming back to our games because they are Bloober Team productions, but it’s a unique selling proposition,” says Babieno. “If you could offer something different from what is on the market, there are much more chances for people to take a look at it. Because players could choose more than just games. They could choose Netflix TV shows, graphic novels or spending time on social networks with friends. So we are not in competition with other horror game makers; I would say we are competing for player time. ”
Babieno says the Game Pass helped expose Bloober Team games to a wider audience
If the Bloober team will come out on top in this competition, Babieno believes that it needs to reach as wide an audience as possible. This is part of the reason why the studio teamed up with Microsoft to put Blair Witch and now The Medium in Game Pass. There are 18 million Game Pass subscribers, says Babieno, and most wouldn’t know about The Medium if it weren’t for the service.
“I think if you create a completely new IP, like with The Medium, systems like Game Pass are really useful, because players will find out about your brand very quickly,” says Babieno.
While some industry observers have expressed skepticism about the long-term effect of the Game Pass and how the “Netflix for gaming” subscription model could affect developers, Babieno says he sees no downside. It also didn’t hurt that when Blair Witch released the Game Pass, Microsoft gave it a marketing boost, including a revealing trailer during its 2019 E3 show.
“It’s very important for a game developer to show their game to as wide an audience as possible,” says Babieno. “So I’d say Game Pass helps us, and we’ll probably try to do that again with Microsoft in the future.”
Regardless of the new inclination of the studio’s action or the way its future projects are distributed, Babieno is confident that their inherent Bloober-ness will be obvious to the players.
“There will still be Bloober Team games,” he says, “and everyone who plays them will get that taste. But they’ll be much more market-oriented.”