The immersive sim is, of course, the best type of game. There’s just no beating it. Being able to stack boxes or throw a refrigerator at a guy? That’s what it’s all about, right there. And yet, despite the fact imsims are god’s own genre, no one ever makes them. Why?
Oh, because they’re hard to make and no one buys them? I guess that makes sense. That’s my takeaway from a recent chat that Nightdive CEO (and System Shock Remake director) Stephen Kick had with FRVR.
“They don’t perform financially the same way that other genres do,” said Kick. “It’s a known fact, you make an imsim game you’re going to be appealing to a very small, niche group of fans that are going to love it, they’re going to be very vocal about it, and they’re going to try to convince their friends to play it, and they may or not be successful.”
So why does Nightdive keep working on them? Well, it agrees with us: Kick says the team “don’t generally take in financial performance as a metric for whether or not we work on something or not, but we do it because we love these games and we consider them to be works of art, and we don’t want that art to be lost.”
But another factor militating against the beautiful proliferation of the imsims we all want and deserve is that, well, they’re kind of tough to make and when you are making them, it’s hard to know if it’s actually good or not until just before release.
“Rob [Fermier, who worked on the original System Shocks] shared some interesting anecdotes,” said Kick. “He said that, basically, the game would come together at the 12th hour, and it really wouldn’t feel like the sum of its parts accounted for much until the last month of development when it all clicked.
“Thankfully, we’ve been in a position where we could invest the money and the resources and the time to do the game that we wanted to because we love it and we want other people to experience it. But when you start getting up at AAA budgets, it’s not a luxury that many could afford to take a risk on.”
Inexplicably (very explicably), companies tend not to want to take big punts on that kind of thing, particularly when—if you do happen to make a great one—your maximum potential reach consists of the collective PC Gamer staff and whoever still has Thief installed, even if we’re clearly correct and righteous.
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