Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 Dev Says Big Budget Games Are Failing in Part Because Teams Are Over-Scoping Their Projects
Concord. Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. Star Wars Outlaws. Final Fantasy 16. The list of big budget video game failures is growing longer each month, with triple-A publishers struggling to make a dent in the dominance of older, more established players in this most brutal of markets.
Throughout it all, massive hits come out of nowhere. One of those is Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, developed by World War Z and SnowRunner studio Saber Interactive and published by Focus Entertainment.
Of course, Space Marine 2 benefited from the strength of the Warhammer 40,000 brand, which is carefully managed by Games Workshop and about as big as it’s ever been. But still, Space Marine 2’s breakout success came as a surprise even to its developer, as Saber Chief Creative Officer Tim Willits told IGN in a recent interview.
As the video game industry comes to terms with the high-profile failure of the likes of Concord and Suicide Squad, what enabled Space Marine 2 to succeed? Both Concord and Suicide Squad took years to develop at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, and launched into genres some say gamers had long since moved on from. In some respects Space Marine 2 is similar. It is Saber’s biggest ever video game undertaking and took over four years to develop — a significant cycle as far as triple-A production goes although, as we’ve seen with Concord and Suicide Squad, hardly an outlier.
Indeed we’ve seen huge hits from video games that had similarly long developments. Arrowhead’s Helldivers 2, the fastest-selling PlayStation Studios game of all time, took just shy of eight years to develop and at significant expense. It is an oversimplification to say Concord and Suicide Squad's long developments were the root cause of their failure, although they clearly played a big part.
This week, Epic Games boss Tim Sweeney said the games industry was going through what he called a “generational change” that had led to some games failing to sell as well as their publishers
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