Bloober Team CEO Piotr Babieno can identify two turning points in the Polish developer’s history.
As he explains 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 for being the worst game on PS4 at the time,” Babieno said. “We made a multiplayer game and the online multiplayer didn’t work properly.”
After the game was rerun from scratch 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 other people and other successful teams were trying to capture,” says Babieno. “So we tried to do something that we would personally be proud of. I decided we needed to focus on the genre that would be very close to us. [tastes]
The company revolved around psychological horror games, had an Early Access hit with Layers of Fear, and has since built a reputation with Observer, Layers of Fear 2, Blair Witch and most recently the PC and Xbox Series X | S excluding The Medium.
The Medium was actually the first of those horror games that Bloober Team came up with, but Babieno says it had to be burnt back until more capable hardware was available to help realize the team’s vision. Now that it’s out and that vision has been fulfilled, Babieno says 2021 is a second turning point for the company.
[Psychological horror] is still in our DNA “, says Babieno.” We’d still love to get a taste of game making, but we’d love to tell our stories more with action. Therefore, 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 on the edge” for Bloober Team, which spans the old and new approach of the company. Babieno says the studio plans to “make advanced AA games with AAA-quality graphics and animation, but of course a bit smaller.”
He adds, “In fact, we’ve been working on another gaming project, another horror IP, for over a year, and we’re doing this with a very famous gaming publisher. I can’t tell you who. I can.” I can’t tell you what the project is, but I’m pretty sure when people realize we’re working on it, they’re going to be really excited. “
A number of horror franchises have turned to action over the years in an effort to gain wider acceptance, and even if the sale has proven the contention, they are often controversial for the fanbase at large.
“We have had that conversation for three years,” says Babieno. “Because we realized we are in a niche, and we would like to broaden that niche. Our future projects aren’t necessarily going to be horror games. They could be called thrillers. We’re a lot broader with The Medium and things. which we’ll try to do in the future.
“When you think about Resident Evil 8, Hellblade 2, even in some ways The Last of Us … This is the area we’d like to be in. And yet we want to keep our DNA, some fears and emotions, those things that our eyes are hidden. But again, we would not like to make the environment our stories, but rather have ‘real’ stories with characters, action, and so on. “
Babieno knows that some fans will be willing to check out Bloober Team’s future endeavors based simply on the studio’s track record at the moment, but clearly that won’t be enough to stand out in a horror genre that’s not only growing, but also diversifies with innovative hits. such as the four-player co-op Phasmophobia.
“Of course we have some core fans coming back to our games because they are Bloober Team productions, but it’s all about a unique sales proposition,” Babieno says. “If you could offer something different than what’s on the market, people are much more likely to watch it. Because gamers can choose more than just games. They could choose Netflix TV shows, graphic novels or time on. social networking with friends. So we don’t compete with other horror game producers, I would say we compete for gamers’ time. ”
Babieno says Game Pass helped expose Bloober Team’s games to a wider audience
If Bloober Team comes out on top in that match, Babieno thinks it should reach the widest possible audience. That’s part of why the studio teamed up 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 had it not been for the service.
“I think if you create a completely new IP address, like with The Medium, systems like Game Pass are very useful because gamers get to know your brand quickly,” Babieno says.
While some industry viewers are skeptical about Game Pass’s long-term impact and how the “Netflix-for-games” subscription model could hurt developers, Babieno says he doesn’t see any downsides. It also didn’t hurt that when Blair Witch launched Game Pass, Microsoft gave it a marketing push, including a revealing trailer at the E3 2019 show.
“It is very important for a game developer to show his game to the widest possible audience,” Babieno says. “So I would say Game Pass is helping us, and maybe in the future we will try to do that again with Microsoft.”
Regardless of the studio’s new propensity for action or how the future projects are distributed, Babieno is confident that their inherent blooberness will be evident to players.
“They will still be Bloober Team games,” he says, “and everyone who plays them will get that flavor. But they will be much more mass-market oriented.”