When asked if there was some pride swallowing involved for Remedy to handle work-for-hire on the campaign mode of another company's multiplayer-focused game, Puha noted that it's fairly common for large games to have one studio handle the campaign while another focuses on multiplayer, pointing to Call of Duty titles and Star Wars: Battlefront 2 as examples. On top of that, he said it's not that different from the studio's past work.
"You make it sound worse than it really is," Puha said. "While we worked on Quantum Break and did the creative work on that, it's still Microsoft's IP. It's their baby. They put the funds into it so they had a lot of say into what kind of game that would be. In the case of Crossfire, the nice thing was we were approached by Smilegate. They saw Remedy did good story and they wanted that. Remedy had a lot of people who were interested in doing a first-person shooter even though the studio hadn't before, and they got a lot off creative freedom to do it."
On top of that, Crossfire 2 also plays well into the company's strategy of building its brand with new audiences. The game also presents a chance for the studio to build its brand among first-person shooter fans, as well as in Asian markets where Crossfire is huge, but Remedy is not as well known.
"It was a really good opportunity for us to try to do something really different," Puha said. "There are a lot of challenges. It's the first time we're doing a first-person shooter, obviously, so how do we bring that 'Remedy-ness' into it? How do we define that? It's been an interesting challenge."
As for Project 7, the company has said little about the game itself beyond confirming it as a "cinematic third-person action game," which sounds very much like Remedy's speciality. It will sport some changes to the Remedy formula, as the company has promised it will be a "long-lasting experience" with "the deepest game mechanics yet in a Remedy game."
Those specific changes seemed to loom large when Puha discussed the plight of single-player games, a topic of much discussion in recent months.
"Obviously that's something we've given a lot of thought to, not just due to recent discussion but also over the last several years," Puha said. "There's the crazy part of making a game where it takes four or five years, and then the game is over [for the player] in like a weekend. 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.
"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."
Some of Remedy's recent moves have been in part to address that cost. It brought
505 Games on to publish Project 7 in a deal that sees Remedy not only receive €7.75 million in development funds, but also retain intellectual property rights to the game. The IPO also brought in money Puha said will help put it in position to not just continue making games but doing so while retaining control of their IP and giving them more control over how their titles are presented to the market. And with multiple teams at work, the studio will also retain some flexibility to continue taking on work for other partners along the lines of the Crossfire 2 campaign.
