CI Games is downsizing. They’re not aiming to make anymore AAA games after stumbling out of the gate with Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3 like a drunkard out of the De Hems Dutch bar in west London on a pitch black Friday night. Instead, CI is gunning for more mid-tier releases, and Lords of the Fallen 2 will fit snugly within that ethos once they get it up and out sometime within the next two years.
Speaking with Eurogamer, CEO Marek Tyminski explained…
“I wouldn’t say it’s a couple of years away,” […] “We’ve been working quite a lot on Lords of the Fallen 2, we really did a lot. It’s really finding the best teams who can work on that game together, and when we have that setting, we pretty much know what we want to do.”
So it’s definitely not two years away, but it’s not coming anytime soon either… so does that mean late 2018 or early 2019? I suppose it’s before 2020… right?
Former lead on Lords of the Fallen, Tomasz Gop, was actually let go because they were reducing the team, size, scope and budget for Lords of the Fallen 2.
He felt they probably weren’t actually producing the game due to the delays and CI Games’ focus on Sniper Ghost Warrior 3.
According to Tyminski, with the sales failure of Sniper Ghost Warrior 3, and lots of critical feedback on bugs and glitches scattered throughout the open-world, he realized that they couldn’t hang with the big boys producing AAA games. He even seemed to allude to the failure of Mass Effect: Andromeda when talking about how some companies should settle for producing single A titles…
“The market is really changing, because you see some major releases, the real blockbusters, doing great numbers, but then you have games that are called triple-A but in fact they’re not triple-A by today’s standards – maybe they were by three year’s ago standards – and they are suffering by not really selling as many units as anyone projected.
“Definitely Sniper Ghost Warrior 3 is one of them but there are several examples, even lately – without me telling you which games I’m talking about there are definitely several examples. So the market is changing, it’s consolidating among the largest releases.
CI Games will be scaling back in marketing, production size and budgets to avoid competing on the blockbuster level.
I think most people would agree that it’s a wise decision. Mid-budget games are the rarity these days and too many studios keep trying to bite off more than they can chew. Lest we not forget that Demon Souls was a budget-priced single-A title that managed to strike success because it didn’t try to do too much. Hopefully CI Games follows in From Software’s footsteps and keeps the scope and budget for Lords of the Fallen 2 respectable, but also manage to keep the game original and creative, too.
