Bloober Team Leader Piotr Babieno can mark two turning points in the history of the Polish developer.
As he explains it to him GamesIndustry.biz in a recent conversation, the first turning point came in 2014.
“We launched Basement Crawl for PS4, and of course the game is very famous because it was the worst game on PS4 at the time,” Babieno says. “We played a multiplayer game and online multiplayer didn’t work properly.”
After redoing the game from the start to make good on their promises, Team Bloober thought of their way as a studio.
“We realized in 2014 that we worked mostly on titles that were trying to capture other people and other teams that were successful,” Babieno says. “So we tried something to do which we would be personally proud of. I decided that we should focus on the species that would be very close to ours [tastes]. “
The company was involved in psychological horror games, early access hit Layers of Fear, and they have since built a reputation with Observer, Layers of Fear 2, Blair Witch, and more recently, the PC and Xbox Series X | S Moderate prohibitive.
Midfield was the first of those awful games created by Team Bloober, but Babieno says it would have to be reversed to make more capable hardware available to help the team’s vision. to implement. Now that he’s out and that vision is fulfilled, Babieno says 2021 marks a second turning point for the company.
“[Psychological horror] still in our DNA, “Babieno says.” We’d still like to get this taste of game-making, but we’d like to tell more of our stories with action. That’s why our future projects will be bigger 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 the Bloober Team, going beyond the company’s old approach and their new approach. Babieno says the studio plans to “make progressive AA games with AAA graphics quality and animation, but of course a little less.”
He said, “Of course, we’ve been working for over a year on another game project, another awesome IP, and we’re doing this with a famous game publisher. I can’t tell you who. I can.” I’ll tell you what the project is about, but I’m pretty sure when people realize we’re working on it, they’ll be excited. “
A number of horror rights over the years have moved to action to try to accept it in general, and even when sales have confirmed the dissertation, they have often been controversial to the fanbase in general.
“We’ve been talking about that for three years,” Babieno says. “Because we’ve realized that we’re in a special place, and we want to make that niche wider. Our projects may not be terrible games in the future. They could be We are much broader with the Media and the stuff that we do. ” We are 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 realm in which we want to be. And yet we want to keep our DNA, show some fears and emotions, those things that are hidden in our eyes.But again, we would like not to make an environment in our stories, but to have ‘real’ stories with characters, action and so on. “
Babieno knows that some fans will be willing to look at Team Bloober ‘s future endeavors just based on the studio’ s history at this stage, but clearly that won’t be enough to stand still. out in an awesome genre that only grows but multiplies with an innovative goal. as the four-player co-op Phasmophobia.
“Of course we have some key fans who come back to our games because they are Bloober Team productions, but it ‘s about having a special sale offer,” Babieno says. you could offer something different from what is on the market, there is a lot more chance for people to take a look. Because gamers could choose more than just games. They could choose Netflix TV shows, graphic novels, or consumption. time on social networks with friends. So we’re not competing with other awesome game producers; I would say we are competing for gamers time. ”
Babieno says Game Pass has helped bring Team Bloober games to a wider audience
If Team Bloober is going to emerge in that tournament, Babieno believes it needs to reach as wide an audience as possible. That’s part of the reason the studio teamed up with Microsoft to put Blair Witch and now The Medium in Game Pass. There are 18 million Game Pass subscribers, Babieno says, and most people wouldn’t know about Medium if it weren’t for the service.
“I think if you’re creating an entirely new IP as with The Medium, systems like Game Pass are very useful because gamers will learn about your brand very quickly,” Babieno says.
While some viewers of the industry have been skeptical about the long-term impact of Game Pass and how the “Netflix-for-games” membership model could hurt developers, Babieno says he sees no ill effects on it. Also unharmed when Blair Witch launched into Game Pass, Microsoft gave it a marketing boost by introducing a feature trailer during its E3 2019 platform show.
“It’s very important for a game developer to show their game to as wide an audience as possible,” Babieno says. “So I would say that Game Pass helps us, and in the future we may try to do some of that with Microsoft again. “
Whether it’s the studio’s new penchant for action or how its future projects unfold, Babieno is confident that their Bloober-ness players will be visible to players.
“They’ll still be Bloober Team games,” he says, “and everyone who plays them will get that taste. But they’ll be a lot more focused on the market.”