8 Sep, 2011
When we think of games like Enslaved or Darksiders, we think of games that enjoyed great critical reception, and yet sold incredibly poorly at retail outlets. The gaming public let a couple of gems fall through the cracks, and Ninja Theory says the Triple-A gold standard model is to blame.
True, gamers don’t want to take chances when a game is asking for $60.00 a pop, but Tameem Antoniades, chief designer at Ninja Theory, said that this isn’t a healthy mindset. “If you’re paying that much for a game, you don’t want to take chances,” he said in an interview with GamesIndustry. “You want everything to be there, all the feature sets. You want it to be a known experience, guaranteed fun. That’s not healthy.”
Everyone’s a critic these days, and unfortunately we want everything to be proven before dropping the dough. With the big bucks pouring into series like Gears of War, Assassin’s Creed, and Elder Scrolls, players know they’re getting their money’s worth because these franchises are already established — Antoniades says that this is the mindset that creates problems when developers attempt to introduce new and unknown IPs. “I think Enslaved suffered from being a new IP, from not having a name and not being pushed hard as a new IP,” said Antoniades of Ninja Theory’s 2010 title. “I don’t know what it was like outside the UK, but I think it was pretty much non-existent.”
This wasn’t the reason why Ninja Theory took on DmC either, said Antoniades. Ninja Theory was in the midst of minding their own business with Enslaved, when Capcom approached them. “Capcom came to us during the development of Enslaved, quite early actually, during production,” he said. “…We turn down a lot of games that are offered to us, not because we’re snobbish about what we do, but we are independent. One of the advantages of being independent is to be able to pursue things you want to do rather than the things you’re forced to do.
“I would rather not be working in games than be working on things I didn’t want to work on. Devil May Cry was one of the favorite games of old and Capcom coming to us and saying, ‘we need a new take on it, a new vision for it,’ was thirlling. We had to grab that opportunity, we had to make it happen somehow. It was more like that.”
With their successes (and failures) of past projects, Ninja Theory says that part of the problem with the failure of new IPs is the current retail model. “We’re in this kind of AAA bracket, I guess you could call it,” said Antoniades. “High budget, high stakes retail model — the barriers to entry for that are so high, so difficult, that we seem to be getting, being offered, decent work in that area. It’s hard to say no when you’ve got a team of 100 and you have to keep the payroll going. Another big project comes along, you tend to go for it.
“There’s always an opportunity between projects to explore things, a lot of team members are hobbyists, they create their own iPhone games and things like that so I can see us kind of taking a punt with [working on smaller titles instead of one large project]. It can’t come soon enough. The whole digital revolution is happening now and it can’t come soon enough. The model we’re under, the big retail model, is creaking.”
It’s a painful sacrifice to make. Do you create one giant triple-A title just to satisfy the consumers, or do you step out of the box and attempt to create something new and fresh, and suffer the consequences? Ninja Theory isn’t the only one to feel the burn, but they’ve spent many a year poking at the fire.
Read the full interview with Ninja Theory and GamesIndustry here.
Via EDGE.
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