Single-player games no longer pay the bills, according to Starbreeze Studios’ Almir Listo, who told the audience at Reboot Develop that the Swedish company is now more likely to publish than make games with no co-op or multiplayer elements.

Listo is global brand director at Starbreeze, a company that has changed dramatically since the days when games like Chronicles of Riddick and The Darkness established it as an industry leader in single-player development. Over the last few years the vast majority of its revenue has come from Payday, a multiplayer franchise created by Overkill Software, an independent studio Starbreeze acquired in 2012.

At Overkill, Listo said, the focus is always on playability and, more pertinently, replayability. “The people that got the most respect and were the most important people on the development team, were the QA testers,” he said. “They have the highest status in our company. Because we work in such a flat structure, they are the gatekeepers.

“One of the problems that Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons had for sure was that it’s not replayable. It’s a beautiful story, but it ends”

“They are the people that make sure we don’t release shit… A game developer with a focus on QA is a game developer that makes sure the game is fun.”

According to Listo, the fact that Payday’s community can be so critical of the game is a positive. Those players have often invested “6000 hours” of time into the experience, so that hate emanates from a deep-rooted sense of devotion and love. The capacity to build that kind of relationship with its audience is something that the widely acclaimed Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons lacked, Listo said.

Despite that acclaim, the Brothers IP was sold in 2015 shortly after one its principal creators, Josef Fares, left the company. In light of the growing importance of Overkill to Starbreeze in economic terms, and the recent success of Dead by Daylight, another multiplayer IP, the sale of Brothers now seems like a watershed moment. Listo’s comments at Reboot only reinforced that notion.

“You need to find the thing that makes it replayable,” Listo said. “One of the problems that Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons had for sure was that it’s not replayable. It’s a beautiful story, but it ends. And as many lovely emails as we’ve received about that game, it doesn’t pay salaries.

“Payday, however, because the game is replayable like few other games… it allowed us to continue pushing out content for the game, which allowed us to keep monetising the players who were interested in the game.”

“We’re great at doing co-op games and multiplayer games. That’s why The Walking Dead game we’re making is a co-op game, that’s why the Crossfire game we’re making is a co-op game. We want to focus on that, and leave the single-player games to people like you.”

“We’re great at doing co-op games and multiplayer games… We want to focus on that, and leave the single-player games to people like you”

When asked if there was still room for a game like Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons as a first-party product, Listo wouldn’t rule out the possibility. Overkill’s game based on The Walking Dead IP will have a more developed narrative than Payday, he offered, though that is still a very different prospect to a game like Brothers, or even a game like The Darkness. “Talking about single player adventures in particular, there’s opportunities. Absolutely,” he added. “As long as we have the people to work on it, why not?

“The question of whether Starbreeze would ever do another single-player game? Yeah, but we’d rather have another studio approach us with a beautiful idea. We want to focus on what we’re good at now, which is co-op games…but feel free to approach us. We’re interested in all kinds of deals.”

This position is backed up by Starbreeze’s activities as a publisher over the last few months, a period in which it has signed and committed to significant investments in Double Fine’s Psychonauts 2 and Otherside Entertainment’s System Shock 3. At the outset of his talk, Listo emphasised that Starbreeze’s history of single-player development, and the understanding it therefore has of what it takes to ship a great game, is a big part of why those studios trust it as a publisher.

“The most important thing you can learn in your industry career is that it’s a people business. You are no better than the partner you work with,” he said. “It’s simply trust. If you and I do a publishing deal together, we believe in you.

“Because we understand what video game development is about”

John Riccitiello opened his company’s GDC 2017 keynote in much the same style he has every major Unity presentation over the past few years: reiterating the company’s three goals, one of which is solving hard problems.

Until now, this has predominantly focused on the problems faced by coders, programmers and anyone else that has to deal with what he calls the “nitty gritty” of games development. But this year, Riccitiello announced the company would start to concentrate on members of the creative process that Unity has perhaps overlooked in the past: artists and designers.

The presentation was just the start of this. The firm opened a competition to win the newly-created role of artist-in-residence at Unity, while Natalya Tatarchuk, the engine firm’s new graphics director and Bungie’s former graphics lead on Destiny, discussed the visual upgrades that Unity has planned.

Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz in San Francisco, the Unity CEO explained that this added focus on the visual aspect of games development is just the next natural step in the company’s evolution.

John Riccitiello, Unity

“Our business planning process starts by asking what the greatest pain for developers is and how we can help them the most,” Riccitiello tells us. “When we started Analytics, we didn’t have any idea what we were going to do with it, we just knew developers needed it – and now we’ve turned that into an effective augmentation of our ad business and it’s growing really quickly, so it turned out to be a smart thing from a business perspective. We offer Collaborate [a cloud-hosted service that enables devs to share and sync their Unity project], we don’t make any money off of it, we just figure out how to invest in it. And that’s maybe less wise – just don’t tell my Board.

“I’ve run studios directly as a general manager at EA for a long time, and I’ve seen artists work really hard creating a scene or animation. They give it to the programmer who puts it in the game but then says the level of detail has to be cut by half because it’s bringing the framerate down. It puts both the programmer and the artist in an awkward position, and it’s a pretty sucky process – particularly if you’re an artist. You might sometimes feel like the technology choices are the lowest common denominator, where your creativity is curtailed. We think we can solve that.

“The whole industry has grown up around this constraint, but it doesn’t have to be that way”

“We think we can essentially put the artists and designers on a level playing field with the programmers so they can work in a collaborative way with the same tools. We talked about visual scripting, and that can be just as powerful, just as leveraging as programming when done well. So artists, designers and programmers can be partners. This is simply us attacking a fundamental problem that I think gets in the way of creativity. Any great programmer or technologist realises they’re often in this position of being a gating item or a block to the creativity of the artist – and that sort of sucks. That’s not a good place to be. The whole industry has grown up around that constraint, but it doesn’t have to be that way.”

Building tools that satisfy the needs of studios’ coding, art and design departments is also an extension of the impact Riccitiello has had on Unity as a company. Recalling his early days at the engine provider, the CEO says his first priority was to “staff up aggressively” on technical talent – more recently, this has expanded to include art and technical art talent. Bringing in experienced people such as Tatarchuk, people who have experienced first-hand what developers need to accomplish their visions, enables Unity to better tailor its engine to the changing standards of games today.

Cinematics tool Timeline is just one of the upcoming features Unity believes will make its tech more accessible to artists and designers

Riccitiello estimates his company has the equivalent talent to “two significant production teams” but distributed across the organisation rather than making games. This latter point is crucial to the exec: while he’s happy for the team to produce tech demos such as short film Adam, he intends to maintain a strict line between tools and games development.

“I believe you can’t be good at everything,” he says. “People that make great games are often not very good at making great tools, and vice versa. If Unity were building an FPS… if you [as a developer] were making an FPS yourself, you’re going to wonder what advantage in the core tech our product has over another. Over the years when I was on the content side, I worried about that.

“We wanted to be like a large-scale game production studio that doesn’t have to ship games”

“We wanted to be as if we were a large-scale game production studio where we don’t compete with our customers and we don’t have to ship games. We want to ship things that make games developers more successful.”

His comments allude to his principal competitors: Epic Games and its Unreal Engine, Crytek and CryEngine, and Amazon’s Lumberyard. All three firms focus primarily on the production of tools for other developers, but still continue to produce their own titles as showcases for their tech.

Riccitiello on stage at Unity’s GDC 2017 presentation, promising to level the playing field between coding, art and design teams

Competition in the engine space has heated up over the past few years, particularly with the introduction of Lumberyard and both Epic and Crytek adopting a free or pay-what-you-want model. And yet Riccitiello is comfortable with Unity’s position in the market. During the presentation, he may have focused on Unity’s dominance on mobile – powering 38% of the Top 1000 games on iOS and Android – but he maintains his company is a force to be reckoned with on any platform.

“Our share is higher on console – we just don’t talk about it as much,” he says. “It’s not a very big market for development by comparison to mobile. Our market share is comparable, if not a little higher. It’s higher in VR as well: 59% to 71%, depending on the platform. So we’re big there, too – it’s just not as many developers in comparison to mobile. Mobile is legions compared to console and the number of developers in that space. I don’t think there is much competition for us in mobile. There is some for us in console – our principal competitor [is mainly used in] 20 or so high-profile projects, so the actual market share for us is much larger.”

Riccitiello went on say that he actually relishes having such powerful competitors out there to contend with: “They’re damn good engineers and they do some really good things. Sometimes we learn from watching what they do, and sometimes they learn from watching what we do. Realistically, the current version of Unreal is a pretty good copy of Unity. Of course, I’m not saying they’re actually copying us, not at all. I think Tim Sweeney is awesome. What I mean is their product wasn’t set up for ease of use in mobile, but now they’re a lot closer.”

He reiterates that Unity’s market share is very high “on almost any platform you can think of”, and stresses that thanks to services like Unity Analytics and Unity Ads, he believes the business is “not really a game engine company exclusively”.

“We spend as much time and energy on helping developers solve other hard problems that aren’t just related to content creation, like making money – and none of our competitors compete with us there”

He elaborates: “We’re a developer company. We spend as much time and energy on helping developers solve other hard problems that aren’t just related to content creation, like making money – and none of our competitors compete with us there”

Unity’s presentation at GDC was a stark contrast to that of Unreal. While Riccitiello and his team focused solely on games development and new features that will help these customers, Unreal once again rolled out a string of high-profile partnership with the likes of Andy Serkis, LucasFilm and Chevrolet. When asked if Unity has any plans to expand its efforts outside the realm of video games, Riccitiello remarks that it already has.

“We tend not to talk about it a lot, but Jet Propulsion Lab uses us for the Mars Rover and CERN uses us for the Large Hadron Collider,” he says. “Almost anyone that uses VR for architecture uses us. The gambling industry is pretty much centred on using Unity.

“My view is that until we were perfect at nailing the gaming, AR and VR business, I was going to keep our concentration on that so we didn’t dilute our efforts. But there is a huge number of folks that use our product outside of the games industry – we just try to keep our focus tight.”

Architects, the company behind the Mars Rover and even the Large Hadron Collider all use Unity is some form – but Riccitiello remains steadfastly focused on games

Unity’s games business has undergone a series of changes over the past year, not the least of which was splitting its userbase into three subscription tiers: Personal, Pro and Plus. The introduction of the latter caused some grumbling from long-running Unity developers, concerned that the tech was becoming too expensive after Unity removed the pay-to-own option and focused on a yearly fee. But the firm was quick to tweak its offering in order to address some of these issues. Nonetheless, some devs remain disgruntled, particularly given how cheap rival technology is. Is Riccitiello still facing heat for these changes?

“I wouldn’t say that subscription is one gigantic bonfire party where they all ran into our camp, but they didn’t all leave either and we continue to grow”

“No single customer has complained to me, and our usage numbers are up dramatically,” he says. “The number of downloads is up, the number of customers is up. I wouldn’t say that subscription is one gigantic bonfire party where they all ran into our camp, but they didn’t all leave either and we continue to grow.

“There was a little noise when we first did it, so we made some adjustments to make sure we’re listening to our customers. We trip, sometimes more often than other companies, but we fix it quickly. There were a couple of wrinkles with subscriptions, but now everyone seems to like it. And it’s a more logical way to pay for something that’s changing every quarter.”

Quarterly updates is perhaps the biggest change Unity is now going through. With version 5.6 of its engine released at the end of March, the firm has brought the Unity 5 cycle to a close and is now gearing up for the first release of Unity 2017. It’s not confirmed whether the year tag will be updated every 12 months – i.e. Unity 2018, Unity 2019, and so on – but the implication is there. Previously, Unity life cycles would span multiple years. Is Riccitiello and his team now under pressure to deliver a significant overhaul every year in order to make the new version seem more valuable?

“We deliver more in Unity 5.6 than we did in the entire cycle of Unity 4,” he says. “The point I’m making is there’s no way to measure. For a very long time, Unity had a relatively small development operation – less than 100 developers focusing on producing our core tech. We’re now many, many times larger than that, we’re producing so much more content. Each quarterly release is a major upgrade.

“This gives us permission to avoid a couple of stupid things, like holding something back to put in the next big edition because you’re trying to sell something. Now if something’s ready, we put it out immediately. Part of the reason we do that is we support so many platforms. Back on Unity 3, we supported four platforms – now it’s more than 30. Apple has Metal on MacOS so are we going to ask developers to wait for Unity 6 before we support that? No, we’ll put it in next quarter.”

Unity’s experimental VR Editor makes it easier for developers to experience levels as their players will – even when still building them

Even so, does incremental updates every quarter not limit Unity’s ability to signify the biggest overhauls? The launch of Unity 5 was a call to action for many devs as it was instantly recognisable as a momentous advancement over Unity 4.

“We’re not having any problems selling it,” Riccitiello says. “Can you think of a developer that doesn’t use it? We’re not having trouble getting new users.”

He goes on to add that the key new features in each quarterly update will serve as selling points for new and sometimes more specific customers. Unity 5.6’s cinematics tool Timeline, the scriptable rendering pipeline on course for Unity 2017, and even the C# jobs system discussed at the presentation will be a “big deal” to someone in the Unity-trained community.

There is also the chance for developers to contribute to future updates. Plenty of developers customise and build on Unity’s tech, and Riccitiello says the firm is always keen to work with such studios to integrate their improvements into the engine. The most notable example of this is the competition for Unity devs to create new features for its VREditor, which allows users to create levels and environments from within virtual reality itself. It could be argued that Unity is simply calling on the community to fix its tool on its behalf, but Riccitiello says this isn’t the case.

“The vast majority of what’s in Unity is built by Unity,” he says. “We’ve been partnering with people for a decade now, and on occasion they’ll do a source view with us, they’ll make an improvement and we’ll import that improvement into the core. We’re not so arrogant to suggest that every idea has to be ours.”

The AAA model in increasingly developing into a market in which only the biggest companies can survive – and even then the design of these titles will become more stagnant.

That’s according to Boss Key Productions founder and Gears of War creator Cliff Bleszinski. Speaking to attendees at Reboot Develop today, the veteran games developer discussed the “really, really weird spot” blockbuster games have found themselves in, and pondered potential solutions.

“AAA is starting to feel like the American restaurant scene,” he said, referring to how increasing globalisation means every major city usually has the exact same chains and franchises when you’re looking for a place to eat. “They’re not bad, they’re not great, they’re just there.”

It’s the same with AAA, which he says has become a “category of eight games that are getting repeated over and over again”. He brought up a slide depicting best-sellers such as Uncharted 4 and the Call of Duty games, stressing that these are “great games” but cost hundreds of millions of dollars to produce and market.

He added that it doesn’t help most consumers view many blockbuster franchises as “the name you know” and are “too scared to take the risk on new IP”.

“$60 is still a lot of money to ask people for,” he said. “And to ask them to make that bet multiple times per year? Gamers are picky, they’re smart.

“This is a nearly unsustainable model, unless you’re an Activision, 2K or a Sony.”

His advice to developers still looking to make their mark is to aim for what he referred to as “Double A”, which he considers to be “games that look and play great but pick their battles in terms of budget and marketing”. Examples he offered included Warframe, Rocket League and Rust, with Bleszinski noting that most successful ‘Double A’ games are digital and/or free-to-play.

In terms of finding funding for such games, he pointed out that “there’s a lot of money in Asia” – his own studio, Boss Key Productions, has partnered with Nexon for its debut game, LawBreakers. This title is also designed to be ‘Double A’, and won’t have a full $60 price tag.

Bleszinski also warned that developers only have one shot to make a new IP, referring to the team at Raven Software: “They made a great game in Singularity, but it ultimately didn’t do well because of the marketing, even though the ratings were great. And now they’re one of the multi-headed hydras behind the Call of Duty series.”

He recognised that the collaborative model used to create titles like Call of Duty and many Ubisoft games, combining the efforts of teams from around the world, is effective but not one he’d ever want to be a part of.

His talk later branched into virtual reality, which he likened to lucid dreaming – something he has apparently spent years trying to master. In fact, VR has helped him hone this elusive skill: “I’m a better lucid dreamer when I wear a sleep mask because I think I’m wearing a headset.”

He stressed that high-quality graphics are the key to immersion in VR, adding that “the best VR looking experiences I’ve had are built in Unreal Engine 4”.

“I’ve not paid to say that by my former employers,” he laughed. “Unity is a good engine but when it comes down to it, you can’t beat Unreal for visual fidelity.”

The issue, as he puts it, is great graphics cost money. Bleszinski is currently pitching a VR project but struggling to get the investment required to make the finished product look as good as it needs to. He observed that shareholders are “only giving out a little money”, which is why the industry is seeing a lot of tech demos coming from the VR space.

He also likened the current trend of wave-based shooting games – such as Raw Data and Robo Recall – as the equivalent of ’80s arcade games such as Galaga and Robotron, adding that he’s confident VR will expand beyond this just as the arcades did.

Bleszinski acknowledged that there are plenty of barriers to overcome before virtual reality is adopted by the masses. Complicated setups, especially for room-scale VR, are particularly off-putting. He referred to his parents that didn’t even set the clock on their VCR – they just wired it into the TV and plugged it in – adding: “Why would they set up VR?”

He continued: “If I were Oculus, Facebook or Vive, I would have kiosks at every major retail location, and a tech team that comes round to set it all up properly”.

“But like all technologies, it’s get better, it’ll get faster. But give it a little bit of time.”

Shopify, a e-commerce specialist that helps companies create digital storefronts, has released a new tool that will help developers sell real-world goods through their video games.

Venturebeat reports the firm’s Custom Storefront dev kit enables games studios to create in-game stores that can be used to sell merchandise, such as T-shirts. Mobile hit Alto’s Adventure is already using this to offer items themed around its characters.

Storefronts can also be customised to be integrated into the game, as if buying virtual items, rather than as a separate store, allowing devs to ensure its merchandise sales are in keeping with the game’s universe.

Merchandise is already a growing area in which smaller developers can find new revenue and build their brand, but typically this is handled through the studio’s website or a third-party storefront. Being able to promote and sell such items directly in-game could raise awareness of these offerings to more than just a game’s most dedicated fanabse.

The dev kit includes the Unity Buy SDK, meaning any Unity devs will be able to introduce various payment options, including Apple Pay for iOS users. A Javascript Buy SDK is also available.