In a press release published late last afternoon, Finnish game studio Remedy announced some changes to its development and financial roadmap. More specifically, it has lowered its revenue and operating outlook result due to the delay of its first multiplayer game, Vanguard.
CEO Tero Virtala said in a statement:
Remedy is currently working on five world-class game titles, and our capability to develop these games is stronger than ever. With our transition to a multi-project operating model, we have learned that it is better to keep our game projects in the early development phase for a longer period of time than in the past. The benefit of this is that the development team size and thus the operating costs stay lower, and it gives the teams the time they require to design, prepare and test key elements of the game before the project moves onto a phase of development where a larger team is required. By doing this, we are supporting both high-quality as well as cost-efficient game development.
We have decided to keep the game codenamed Vanguard longer in the current proof-of-concept phase and postpone the significant expansion of the development team until the year 2023. This will postpone income from 2022 to 2023, which means that we expect our 2022 revenue to remain at the previous year’s level and our operating result to decline significantly compared to the year 2021.
A few months ago, we learned that the free-to-play cooperative multiplayer game codenamed Vanguard will be co-financed by Tencent. Not much is known about the game itself besides a few tidbits discussed by Remedy CEO Tero Virtala regarding the content treadmill issue of co-op games.
In co-op games, the challenge was often the content treadmill. In order to create long-lasting experiences, the developer cannot rely solely on handcrafting and making every single level and mission unique because that’s not typically a path that’s sustainable. We saw that there are unsolved questions about how a long-lasting, service-based co-op game could be made. If we can solve those problems, if we can bring the way we tell stories via the world and exploration, those could be elements we can utilise better in co-op (PvE) than PvP.
