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Bloober Team CEO Piotr Babieno can identify two turning points in the history of the Polish developer.
As he explains to GamesIndustry.biz in a recent conversation, the first turning point came in 2014.
“We launched Basement Crawl for PS4, and in fact the game is very famous because it was the worst game on PS4 at the time,” Babieno says. “We made a multiplayer game and the online multiplayer was not working properly.”
After remaking the game from scratch in order to keep its promises, Bloober Team reflected on its trajectory as a studio.
“We realized in 2014 that we were mainly working on titles that were trying to catch other people and other successful teams,” Babieno explains. “So we tried to do something that we would be personally proud of. I decided that we should focus on the genre that would be very close to our [tastes]. “
The company turned to psychological horror games, enjoyed early access success with Layers of Fear, and has since built a reputation with Observer, Layers of Fear 2, Blair Witch and, more recently, the exclusive for PC and Xbox Series X | S Medium.
The Medium was actually the first of those Bloober Team-designed horror games, but Babieno says it needed to be demoted until better hardware became available to help realize the team’s vision. Now that it’s out and that vision has come true, Babieno says 2021 marks a second turning point for the company.
“[Psychological horror] is still in our DNA, “says Babieno.” We would still like to have this taste of making games, but we would like to tell our stories more with action. That’s why our future projects will be more from a first person perspective, like The Medium. We will have much more advanced game mechanics. “
The Medium is “a project at the limit” for Bloober Team, straddling the old approach of the company and its new. Babieno says the studio plans to make “advanced AA games with AAA quality graphics and animation, but of course a bit smaller.”
He adds, “Actually, we’ve been working for over a year on another game project, another horror IP address, and we’re doing it with a very famous game publisher. I can’t tell you who. I can’t tell you what the project is, but I’m pretty sure when people realize we’re working on it, they’ll be very excited. “
A number of horror franchises over the years have turned to action in an effort to gain wider acceptability, and even when sales have proven their point, they have often proven to be controversial for the grassroots. fans as a whole.
“We’ve been having this conversation for three years,” Babieno says. “Because we realized that we are in a niche, and we would like to expand that niche. Our future projects won’t necessarily be horror games. You could call them thrillers. We’re much broader with The Medium and so on. that we ‘try to do in the future.
“If you think of Resident Evil 8, Hellblade 2, even in some ways The Last of Us… that’s the area we’d love to be in. And we’d still love 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 environment our storytelling, but to have ‘real’ storytelling with characters, action, etc. “
Babieno knows that some fans will be ready to find out about Bloober Team’s future efforts simply based on the studio’s track record at this point, but that clearly won’t be enough to stand out in a horror genre that doesn’t just grow but which diversifies with innovative successes. like four player cooperative phasmophobia.
“Of course we have core fans who come back to our games because they are Bloober Team productions, but it’s all about having a unique selling proposition,” says Babieno. “If you could come up with something different than what’s on the market, it’s a lot more likely that people will take a look. Because gamers can choose more than just games. They can choose Netflix TV shows, graphic novels, or expenses. time on social media with friends. So we’re not in competition with other horror game producers; I would say we are competing for player time. ”
Babieno says Game Pass helped expose Bloober Team’s games to a wider audience
If Bloober Team is to win in this competition, Babieno believes it needs to reach as large an audience as possible. That’s part of the reason the studio partnered with Microsoft to bring Blair Witch and now The Medium into Game Pass. There are 18 million Game Pass subscribers, Babieno says, and most wouldn’t know The Medium without the service.
“I think if you create a whole new IP address like with The Medium, systems like Game Pass are really helpful because players will discover your brand very quickly,” Babieno says.
While some industry watchers have expressed skepticism about the long-term effect of Game Pass and how the “Netflix for games” subscription model could hurt developers, Babieno says he doesn’t. ‘sees no downside. It also didn’t hurt that when Blair Witch launched into Game Pass, Microsoft gave it a marketing boost, including a reveal trailer on his stage show at E3 2019.
“It is very important for a game developer to show his game to as wide an audience as possible,” says Babieno. “So I would say Game Pass is helping us, and in the future we might try to do some of that with Microsoft again.”
Regardless of the studio’s new penchant for action or how its future projects are distributed, Babieno is confident their inherent bloober-ness will be evident to gamers.
“They will still be Bloober Team games,” he says, “and anyone who plays them will have that taste. But they will be much more mass market oriented.”
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