Blackbird on overhauling Crossfire: Legion monetization
Brendan Sinclair
Managing Editor
Thursday 7th July 2022
Blackbird Interactive
Several years ago, Blackbird Interactive answered a call from Smilegate. The Korean publisher of Crossfire was looking for a team to make a real-time strategy game out of the free-to-play first-person shooter phenomenon.
By that time, Crossfire had racked up more than one billion registered PC and mobile players since its 2007 debut, topping charts in China, Brazil, and Vietnam along the way.
"To my interpretation, the plan wasn't to bring more people into this epic-sized thing," Blackbird Interactive CEO Rob Cunningham tells GamesIndustry.biz. "They didn't need more people to be aware of Crossfire; they're doing pretty well in that department. I think it was more to expand the IP, seat it with a more global audience. They wanted to introduce a new faction into the franchise with New Horizon, and recapture what they felt was the charm and tactility of the old-school RTS."
The first order of business was for Blackbird to dig into the Crossfire IP and learn what makes it tick.
"If you're taking an established IP, particularly a popular one with a big fan base, and bringing it into a completely new genre with new gameplay and potentially a new audience, the primary goal is to make sure that what you're making is authentic to the parent IP, to make it a legitimate child," Cunningham says.
"What we found was when the IP holder isn't particularly protective or precious about the pillars of that IP, you can find a situation where one of the pillars may fall. Then you get a three-legged-stool-losing-a-leg situation and the whole thing will sort of collapse."
Blackbird wanted Crossfire: Legion to be true to the original game
So what are Crossfire's pillars?
"One
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