Remedy Entertainment: AAA Single-Player Game Costs 10x More to Make

Remedy Entertainment, the developers behind Quantum Break and Alan Wake, is moving away from traditional AAA single-player games. Despite this, they’ve vowed to continue their trend of focusing on storytelling.

Head of Communications at Remedy, Thomas Puha, revealed more about their decision to shift gears in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz. He talked about the costs of making games like Alan Wake and Quantum Break and how it’s gone up ten times while the audience hasn’t increased at the same speed.

“The reality is the traditional AAA single player experience is just really expensive to make. The expectation level from gamers is really high in terms of how long the game is, what sort of features it has, how good the production values are. All those things are very expensive to do. And if you go back 10 years, you could still say the console market is roughly the same size. In the end, the audience you’re selling to is relatively the same size but the cost of making the game is ten-fold these days. So that’s an obvious problem.”

He also talked about the single-player experience where gamers tend to buy the game, play through it once, and sell it. While they still got the sale, he stated that it can be frustrating for creators to spend years of their lives creating something to have it chewed through so quickly.

“From a creative perspective, even when we made Alan Wake, it was like we spent all this time creating the characters, the universe, the rules and everything. It’s a place where you want the player to spend a longer period of time, and that’s hard to do in the traditional single-player space.”

This may explain why Remedy’s next game, codenamed P7, will have cooperative multiplayer elements. This is likely to keep it in gamer’s hands for longer. They still have not announced a release date for P7, but we can be sure it will be a departure from their usual style.