The video game industry has never seemed more like a roulette table when it comes to what succeeds and what fails. Sometimes even great games are no longer good enough, and you never know when a Steam hit about playing hide-and-seek with spray paint will come out of nowhere to dominate the monthly sales charts. Perhaps because of this, The Blood of Dawnwalker director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz says designing to hit a particular sales target doesn’t work.
The Witcher 3 game director who went off to form his own studio called Rebel Wolves was discussing his new vampire RPG in a recent interview (via MP1st) when the topic of how much the team expects the game to sell arose. “First of all, we are not thinking this way,” Tomaszkiewicz said. “It’s a different way of thinking because we are artists, and all of us, the founders of the company, are the guys who are doing the developer job.”
He continued, “I am the game director, my brother is the creative director, we have a guy that’s responsible for the code, for the art, the narration, and so on. And we don’t want to measure our games in millions of sales. I mean, you need to have money, of course, to create the next part, but we want to create those challenges in front of us and the goals this way to fulfill our artistic and creative need.”
Instead of focusing on sales, Tomaszkiewicz said he prefers to measure success based on the opinions of players and critics. “If it’s possible, maybe some awards, which would be excellent for us as artists,” he added. “Not in the sales, because sales are secondary. I believe that if the game is good, there will be sales. But if you’re thinking about the sales when you create the game, and you try to design the game to achieve sales, it will fail.”
The Blood of Dawnwalker has several things going for it, including a clear pitch–vampire RPG from developers who worked on The Witcher 3–and an positive round of initial previews. But it’s still an AA game fighting for a seat at an ever-shrinking table. Many have blamed the missing middle-ground between low-budget indie games and risk-averse AAA blockbusters for the hollowed-out state of AA gaming in recent years. We’ll see if Rebel Wolves can be the exception.