Gibbons said it was like the planets were finally aligned. Revolution Software began working on the sequel more than 2.5 years ago. We were excited to be part of an exciting new platform.” But this ensured that our creative ambition could be realized. “Apple Arcade is another sea change for us,” Carmody said. The team had to get up to speed on the Unreal Engine, which initially slowed down development a bit. Revolution Software went all-out, making its first game using the high-end Unreal Engine. Apple rewards developers based on how much usage they get.Īnd so story-based games with endings are perfectly suited for the subscription model. The service that eventually became Apple Arcade made sense because it’s based on a business model in which players pay $5 a month. Free-to-play requires constant updates and an endless amount of new content with no ending, as that’s how they get people to keep coming back and spending money.īut Apple wanted Revolution Software to be one of the early developers for its subscription game service. The same is true of most narrative-based games, which have a beginning and an end. I was too young to play it when it came out first.” Reigniting the sequelīeyond a Steel Sky would not have worked as a free-to-play release. At one of the launches, Carmody said she ran into a young man who said, “I can’t wait to play this game. This means even “small genres” like adventure games can be good business on iOS.Īnd some retro fans weren’t even around in the good-old days. Now, the iPhone is an evergreen opportunity, with mobile gaming passing $100 billion in revenues. The late 2000s saw pent-up demand for retro games, and downloads climbed into the millions upon millions. We were just keeping our heads above water. We never recouped our investment in early games. “We were receiving 20% of the revenues from our publishers. “The digital revolution just changed everything for developers,” Carmody said. And the company was able to directly publish games to the iPhone, rather than being at the mercy of publishers who took the lion’s share of revenues. This shift toward mobile helped Revolution Software, still an indie studio, make money on assets it had created earlier. It turned out the digital assets of Beneath a Steel Sky matched the resolution of the iPhone, and Broken Sword worked well on one of the later models. “Charles was busy with other games he had to make, and I had a load of comics and stuff I needed to do, and so the timing was never right,” Gibbons said. This was the case even though Gibbons had a script for the second game already written. Revolution Software went on to create four additional games in the series, which forced it to push off any thoughts of a sequel to Beneath a Steel Sky. It sold more than a million copies on the PlayStation. While Beneath a Steel Sky was popular, the company’s next game, Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars, became its biggest commercial success. Beneath a Steel Sky was the second game, and both were received well by critics, who liked the new style of story-based adventure games. Carmody remembered Cecil put the name down as a joke, and the producer loved the title and chose it, even though the game had no luring and no temptress. The company’s first game was Lure of the Temptress. Carmody was one of a handful of women in games, though she had company in artists working at Revolution Software and she viewed King’s Quest creator Roberta Williams as a role model.
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