Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2sold over five times as many copies as its predecessor, while also hitting a concurrent peak of over 200,000 players. Suffice to say, it brought the series to heights that publisher Pullup Entertainment could have never anticipated.
“We didn’t believe that we could hit seven million unique players,” newly appointed CEO Geoffrey Sardin said in an interview withThe Game Business(viaVideoGamer). “It was incredible for us.”
Unsurprisingly,Space Marine 3 is already in the early stages of development.
The enormous success of Sabre Interactive’s gory squad shooter has solidified Pullup’s faith in double-A games and smaller-budget productions, offering a promising future for Warhammer’s future in video games and a new path forward in this struggling industry.
“With double-A or indie games, there is more agility, more resilience [than triple-A],” Sardin explained. “We can control the budget. There is high creativity to differentiate ourselves. It’s a faster time to market, between one and two years. This is a shift we’ve seen in the numbers.The double-A and indie marketsare thriving right now.
We do not design and publish for everyone.
“We do not design and publish for everyone,” he continued. “We design and produce games forsomeone.And when the execution is right, it ends up resonating with many more people.”
Space Marine 2 Publisher Pullup Entertainment Has A More Optimistic Outlook On The Games Industry
While many devs, players, and analysts alike areconcerned that the games industry is collapsingunder the enormous weight of high-budget, high-risk games — and historic corporate acquisitions, such as the Microsoft Activision Blizzard King buyout — Sardin has a more hopeful view of things.
“The industry has not grown over the past few years, but it has stabilised at a very high level after years of impressive growth,” he continued. “The industry remains powerful, and is used to having phases of stabilisation before returning to growth.”
With lower-budget games like Space Marine 2 proving to be major hits, perhaps the industry’s future lies in smaller-scale double-A games; as Sardin said, they are “thriving”, and the faster turnaround is a far cry from the lengthy dev cycles that place so much pressure on developers.
