Does the Pedigree of a New or Unknown Dev Make a Difference?

Years ago, I ascribed to the conventional wisdom that most gamers don’t know their developers. Meaning that they could not name the developer of some of the games they played, maybe even their favorite games, by name, location, frequent publisher the studio worked with, and whether it was a first or second-party studio or published to multi-platform. Or whether the studio just had a platform that it was mostly focused on as a creative foundation. Then whether or not those gamers knew anything about the studio’s history and what events or schisms it came out of would get even murkier. This was back in the Console Generation 7 era. Admittedly, some of the increased brand awareness since gen 8 and the return of the (idiotic) console brand wars have led to some improvements in this area, albeit for the wrong reasons. But I now am not sure if we live in an era where people only know about Naughty Dog, Sucker Punch, and Insomniac…maybe Bethesda, although that is typically distilled to a lack of awareness of the differences between Bethesda, Bethesda Softworks, ZeniMax, and the studio differences between Arkane, iD, Machine Games, and others. This mainly because the only reason that gamers obtain and utilize this knowledge is to weaponize it in the constant bickering about brands.

Almost every new studio is stood up from a makeup of recently expatriated devs from some other studio, often a big name one. Developers will often reconnect with other creators they knew from a previous project three or four titles back. Sometimes there are firepit conversations about a game idea that take years for devs to get back together on, and the decision to leave the comfort of big financial backing and go the indie route or stand-up your own financial overhead by incorporating your own gig lengthens that road as well. On the consumer end, it is tough for me to decide what games I am going to pay attention to pre-release, and this historical makeup of a studio is often a key element of that.

In recent months, we’ve had a number of new studios crop up out of just these dynamics. Perhaps more than at any other time in history. Partly because the pandemic has caused a large shift in work and collaboration patterns as everyone re-sets to work almost entirely remote in some cases. Also because the shortened TTL of Stadia as a going concern in the development space versus being a specialized Cloud infrastructure play, has led to a sizeable dissolution of aggregated talent back to the industry gene pool. The closure of Visceral, Telltale, Boss Key, Gas Powered Games, Capcom Vancouver, Harmonix just before the pandemic was also a big sieve. And then prior to that a redistribution also occurred with the breakup of THQ, although most of that event left studios intact but just coupling with different publishers. And a bit further back there was the big parting of ways between Vince Zampella and Jason West from Infinity Ward, which of course gave way to ReSpawn Entertainment.

There is no questioning the historical significance of the emergence of the Assassin’s Creed franchise on the gaming landscape. And the devs who were behind the inception of said IP, helmed by newly branded CEO Jade Raymond, have come together to form Haven Entertainment Studios. Their pedigree and contribution to the gaming space is certainly a reason to sit up and take notice to the title they are working on for eventual play on the PlayStation platform. A select number of us recently got together to talk about the wonder that is Arkane Studios and in doing so went back over their DNA; how they emerged out of the divergence in the timeline when EA chose to double-down on consoles versus PC, multiplayer versus single-player, and other characteristics that have come to define its portfolio. So often these small tremors in the gaming timeline become echoes that reverberate with much greater significance than the events that foretold them. Often, seeing these dynamics cascade across the veil of over four decades of gaming history make me feel like Uatu, observing from the Nexus of all gaming timelines. And as the years go on, it becomes more and more difficult to try and assess just which of these ripples it is valuable to pay attention to.

I would love to pay attention to them all. The harsh reality is that the bigger and more significant a given studio and its IP and long-running franchises become, the more likely it is that lead developers and major figures develop creative differences or just a yen for greenfields and leave, to the point that the space packed with studios that are started out of “one of the creative leads of ‘franchise X’ ” just starts to become noise. There seem to be an innumerable set of studios born out of former leads of Bungie and Destiny, 343 and Halo, Bioware and Dragon Age. And now with the recurring reports of toxic environments existing at Activision/Blizzard and Ubisoft, we are seeing more news coverage of the demographic of studios borne out of that splicing. Speaking of splicing, the number of studios that hone back in some way to paths crossed with Irrational Games in some genetic manner is almost too many to count. It is often just too much.

But I think that the sheer magnitude of trying to account for all of these tentacles in the timeline and the variants they spawn as a means to determine what games we should pay attention to should not be cause to be less attenuated to this signal. No, we cannot keep up with them all. But I think it is still important to pay attention to, and to learn from. In many ways, I think of Torchlight as the branch that fixed a lot of the things that I had problems with in Diablo II. Such emergences will continue to occur and I think that our understanding of the history, creative, and social events that begat them lend to the overall consumption experience in playing these games. It is kind of like the marinade that creates the deep flavors running beneath the surface of any given title’s graphics, mechanics, and artistic style. So I think these pedigrees do make a difference, even when the landscape seems exhaustively dotted with studios from a few common points of departure. I’d propose that when it seems like those genetic fibers all seem too common, then you should dive deep, and read more current and past writings covering those teams and personalities and see if you can unearth the key differences that may pervade. I can almost guarantee that the depth of understanding and digestion of the next title you play from them will be much more greatly enriched that you would have though possible.