When you’re a self-funded, self-publishing studio like Rebellion, the team behind the Sniper Elite series and last year’s breakout new IP, Atomfall, you have to find a few ways to stand out from the pack. Steam has ballooned in size in recent years. In 2012, Steam would see about 30 new games per month, or an average of one per day. In March of this year, 2,472 new games hit Steam, or an average of more than 80 new games every day. Between tiny indie teams of as few as one person and mega AAA studios, there are studios like Rebellion trying to survive in the middle, and by many accounts, it’s getting harder. But Rebellion has some battle-tested ways to push out of the crowd.
“The key, I think, is controlling budgets and controlling ambition and having a very focused idea,” CEO Jason Kingsley told me. “So a lot of our games are named in a way that would allow people to guess what they’re all about. Sniper Elite is about being an elite sniper. Zombie Army is–guess what–about an army of zombies, you know?” This sort of simplicity, Kingsley believes, helps consumers quickly make up their minds as to whether a game is for them or not.
“And, you know, even Alien Deathstorm, which we’ve announced recently, it’s about a deathstorm with aliens,” he continued. “I know it sounds a bit stupid, but when we don’t have the marketing money of people, brilliant people like Ubisoft or Electronic Arts, or whoever it might be, we have to have all those things that will allow people to guess what we are.”
Kingsley did add that Atomfall somewhat bucked this trend, but talked me through how the team landed on that one, which isn’t as obvious as some others. “Atomfall’s a bit different. But we wanted ‘atomic.’ We wanted ‘atomic’ in there because we wanted a slightly historical-sounding name. And ‘fall,’ we felt, you know, with Fallout as the name of a set of games and [meaning] decay and decline. We thought it worked quite well to make it [sound] historical.”
Though simplistic naming conventions may get people to stop on your game in the Steam store or another storefront, studios also have to combat the refund window, which allows players on Steam and some other platforms to fully refund a game within the first two hours of playtime.
“We’ve got to deliver on the premise when people start playing our game, because there’s the opportunity to refund the game. So there’s almost no risk these days in buying a game from Steam, for example. […] You download it, you play it, and if you don’t like it, you hand it back, and you get a full refund. That’s great for the consumer, because it means there’s less risk, and if they don’t like a game, okay, fine.
“We really have to deliver on that experience up front. You know, people want to play an elite sniper in World War II. We’ve got to really give them that experience straight away. If you downloaded a game like Sniper Elite, and the first hour was a conversation between two people sitting around a kitchen table, you’d go, ‘This sucks. I want to shoot some Nazis.’ You’d hand it back. So we really want to get you into the game. Get the game set up. Get into the game. Shoot the shit out of something quickly, you know. Show people what the rest of the game is like.”
Coming off the studio’s first award win at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) Awards for Best British Game, I asked if having some hardware like that helps, too.
“We don’t tend to chase awards,” Kingsley said, “but it’s really nice when you get them. You know, I’m more interested in getting the sort of awards [from] the audience. People buying the game, enjoying it, saying good things. And awards are the icing on the cake, really. I think if you chase them, it can become a bit of an obsession. But I think when you get one sort of out–not out of the blue, because we thought [Atomfall] was a good game. But you never know. You never know how a game’s gonna land with people.”
As for what’s next for the studio, Alien Deathstorm is due out in 2027, though don’t expect it to include gen AI artwork when it launches.
