Bloober Team CEO Piotr Babieno can identify two turning points in the history of the Polish developer.
As he explains GamesIndustry.biz in a recent conversation, the first turning point occurred in 2014.
“We released Basement Crawl for PS4 and in fact the game is very famous because it was the worst PS4 game at the time,” says Babieno. “We have created a multiplayer game and the online multiplayer has not worked properly.”
After redoing the game from scratch to fulfill its promises, Bloober Team reflected on its trajectory as a studio.
“We realized in 2014 that we were working mostly on titles that were trying to catch other people and other teams that were successful,” Babieno says. “So we tried to do something that we would personally be proud of. I decided to focus on the genre that would be very close to our [tastes]. “
The company engaged in psychological horror games, was successful in Early Access with Layers of Fear and has since consolidated with Observer, Layers of Fear 2, Blair Witch and, more recently, exclusively for PC and Xbox Series X | S Medium.
The Medium was actually the first of these horror games conceived by Bloober Team, but Babieno says it had to be used until more capable hardware was available to help make the team’s vision a reality. Now that it’s over and that vision is fulfilled, Babieno says 2021 marks a second turning point for the company.
“[Psychological horror] it’s still in our DNA, “says Babieno.” We’d still like to have that taste for making games, but we’d like to tell our stories more with the action. That’s why our future projects will be more from a first-person perspective, like The Medium. We will have a much more advanced game mechanics. “
The Medium is “a project on the brink” for the Bloober team, straddling the company’s old approach and its 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: “In fact, we’ve been working for over a year on another game project, another horror IP, and we’re doing it with a very famous game editor. I can’t tell you who. I can’t.” ‘I explain what the project is, but I’m sure when people realize we’re working on it, they’ll be very excited.’
Over the years, several horror franchises have driven the action in a bid for broader acceptability, and even when sales have proven the thesis, they have often proved controversial to the general fan base.
“We’ve had this conversation for three years,” Babieno says. “Because we realized we’re in a niche and we’d like to make it broader. Our future projects won’t necessarily be horror games. They could be called thrillers. We’re much broader with The Medium and the things we have,” I try. do in the future.
“If you think about Resident Evil 8, Hellblade 2, even in a way The Last of Us … This is the area we’d like to be in. And we’d still like to keep our DNA, showing some fears and emotions, those things that are hidden from our eyes. But again, we would like the environment not to be our story, but to have ‘real’ narratives with characters, actions, etc. “
Babieno knows that some fans will be willing to check out Bloober Team’s future efforts based on the studio’s trajectory right now, but that clearly won’t be enough to stand out in a genre of horror that isn’t just growing, but diversifies with innovative successes. such as four-player cooperative fasmophobia.
“Of course, we have some basic fans coming back to our games because they’re Bloober Team productions, but it’s about having a unique selling proposition,” Babieno says. “If you could offer something different than what’s on the market, there’s a lot more chance for people to see it. Because gamers could choose more than games. They could choose Netflix TV shows, graphic novels or spending time in social media with friends. So we don’t compete with other producers of horror games; I’d say we’re competing for players’ time. ”
Babieno says Game Pass has helped expose Bloober Team games to a wider audience
If Bloober Team is to lead this competition, Babieno believes he needs to reach as wide an audience as possible. That’s part of the reason the studio partnered with Microsoft to put Blair Witch and now The Medium on Game Pass. There are 18 million Game Pass subscribers, Babieno says, and most wouldn’t know about The Medium if it weren’t for the service.
“I think if you create a whole new IP, like with The Medium, systems like Game Pass are really useful because players will learn about your brand very quickly,” Babieno says.
While some industry observers have expressed skepticism about the long-term effect of Game Pass and how the “Netflix for gaming” subscription model could hurt developers, Babieno says he sees no downside to it. Nor did it hurt that when Blair Witch launched Game Pass, Microsoft gave it a marketing boost that included a revealing trailer during its E3 2019 stage show.
“It’s very important for a game developer to show their game to the widest possible audience,” Babieno says. “So I’d say Game Pass is helping us, and in the future we might try to do some of that again with Microsoft.”
Regardless of the new trend in the studio’s action or how their future projects are distributed, Babieno is confident that his inherent Bloober-ness will be evident to players.
“They’ll still be the Bloober Team games,” he says, “and everyone who plays them will have that taste. But they’ll be much more market-oriented.”