Bloober Team CEO Piotr Babieno can identify two turning points in the Polish developer’s story.
As he explains to GamesIndustry.biz in a recent conversation, the first tipping point occurred in 2014.
“We launched Basement Crawl for PS4 and, in fact, the game is very famous because it was the worst PS4 game at the time,” said Babieno. “We made a multiplayer game and online multiplayer did not work correctly.”
After remaking the game from scratch to fulfill its promises, the Bloober Team reflected on its trajectory as a studio.
“We realized in 2014 that we were working mainly on titles that tried to catch other people and other successful teams”, says Babieno. “So we tried to do something that we would be proud of personally. I decided that we should focus on the genre that would be very close to ours [tastes]. “
The company revolved around psychological horror games, had early access success 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 | Exclusive S The Medium.
Medium was actually the first of those horror games that Bloober Team devised, but Babieno says it had to be repressed until more capable hardware was available to help realize the team’s vision. Now that he has left and that vision has been fulfilled, Babieno says that 2021 marks a second turning point for the company.
“[Psychological horror] is still in our DNA, “says Babieno.” We would still like to have that taste of playing games, but we would like to tell our stories more with action. That is why our future projects will be more from the perspective of the first person, as the medium. We will have a much more advanced game mechanics. “
Medium is “a project on the edge” for the Bloober Team, encompassing the company’s old approach and the new one. Babieno says the studio plans to make “advanced AA games with AAA quality graphics and animation, but of course a little smaller”.
He adds: “Actually, we have been working on another game project for another year, another horror IP, and we are doing it with a very famous game publisher. I can’t say who it is. I can” I won’t say which one it’s the project, but I’m pretty sure that when people realize that we’re working on it, they’ll be very excited. “
Over the years, several horror franchises have turned to action in an attempt to broaden acceptance, and even when sales proved the point, they often proved controversial for the fan base in general.
“We have had this conversation for three years,” says Babieno. “Because we realize that we are in a niche and we would like to make it broader. Our future projects will not necessarily be horror games. They could be called thrillers. is trying to do in the future.
“If you think about Resident Evil 8, Hellblade 2, even in some ways The Last of Us … This is the area that we would like to be in. 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 not like to make the environment our narrative, but to have a ‘real’ narrative with characters, action and so on. “
Babieno knows that some fans will be willing to check out the future efforts of the Bloober Team simply based on the studio’s history so far, but that clearly won’t be enough to stand out in a horror genre that is not only growing, but diversifying with groundbreaking successes like the four-player cooperative Phasmophobia.
“Of course, we have some main fans who come back to our games because they are produced by the Bloober Team, but it is all about having a unique selling proposition,” said Babieno. “If you could offer something other than what’s on the market, there’s a lot more chance that people will take a look. Because players could choose more than just games. They could choose Netflix TV shows, comic books or spending social time with friends. So we’re not competing with other horror game producers; I’d say we’re competing for players ’time.”
Babieno says Game Pass helped expose Bloober Team games to a wider audience
If the Bloober Team will be victorious in this competition, Babieno believes that it needs to reach as wide an audience as possible. That’s part of the reason why the studio joined Microsoft to put Blair Witch and now The Medium on Game Pass. There are 18 million Game Pass subscribers, says Babieno, and most would not know The Medium if it weren’t for the service.
“I think if you are creating a completely new IP like The Medium, systems like the Game Pass are really useful because players will learn about your brand very quickly,” said Babieno.
While some industry observers expressed skepticism about the Game Pass’s long-term effect and how the “Netflix-for-games” subscription model could harm developers, Babieno says he sees no disadvantage in this. Nor did it hinder the fact that when Blair Witch was released on Game Pass, Microsoft gave it a marketing boost, including a reveal trailer during its E3 2019 stage show.
“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 that the Game Pass is helping us, and in the future, maybe we will try to do that with Microsoft again.”
Regardless of the studio’s new trend for action or how its future projects are distributed, Babieno is confident that his inherent Bloober-ness will be apparent to players.
“They will still be Bloober Team games,” he says, “and everyone who plays them will have that taste. But they will be much more mass-oriented.”