Edge December 2021

In the process of writing this issue’s cover story we didn’t ask Techland’s Tymon Smektała how much stock he places in Shigeru Miyamoto’s crusty old declaration that a delayed game will eventually be good, while a rushed game will be bad forever. Nowadays, isn’t it more fashionable to launch a game with the intention of overhauling it entirely over time anyway, whether that’s through refinements, season updates, DLC or beyond? It’s an especially relevant point for Techland, which has spent the past five years adding bits to Dying Light, a process that’s helped to retain an active playerbase that even now outnumbers that of most new releases. With all of the challenges facing studios in 2021, it’s easier to imagine modern game development being driven by a much older contention…

In the process of writing this issue’s cover story we didn’t ask Techland’s Tymon Smektała how much stock he places in Shigeru Miyamoto’s crusty old declaration that a delayed game will eventually be good, while a rushed game will be bad forever. Nowadays, isn’t it more fashionable to launch a game with the intention of overhauling it entirely over time anyway, whether that’s through refinements, season updates, DLC or beyond? It’s an especially relevant point for Techland, which has spent the past five years adding bits to Dying Light, a process that’s helped to retain an active playerbase that even now outnumbers that of most new releases. With all of the challenges facing studios in 2021, it’s easier to imagine modern game development being driven by a much older contention…

When Splitgate broke 100,000 concurrent players in July, it may have looked to some like the game was an overnight sensation, another to be filed next to Valheim or Fall Guys. But that success had been a very long time coming for the team at 1047 Games, which first released the game over two years earlier, for most of which time it was played by an audience a few orders of magnitude smaller than this fresh peak. For the studio’s co-founder and CEO, Ian Proulx, the Splitgate story goes back further still – all the way to the early 2010s, in fact, when he was still in high school, and landed on the game’s winningly simple premise: what if Halo, but with portals? But it hasn’t taken long for Splitgate’s…

When Splitgate broke 100,000 concurrent players in July, it may have looked to some like the game was an overnight sensation, another to be filed next to Valheim or Fall Guys. But that success had been a very long time coming for the team at 1047 Games, which first released the game over two years earlier, for most of which time it was played by an audience a few orders of magnitude smaller than this fresh peak. For the studio’s co-founder and CEO, Ian Proulx, the Splitgate story goes back further still – all the way to the early 2010s, in fact, when he was still in high school, and landed on the game’s winningly simple premise: what if Halo, but with portals? But it hasn’t taken long for Splitgate’s player explosion…

Understanding the twisty release schedule of Splitgate requires almost as much mental gymnastics as navigating the game’s portals. In its two and half years on Steam, the title has never been listed as an Early Access release – the version of the game that first became available on PC in May 2019 was a “soft launch”, Proulx says. “What we viewed it as internally was our MVP – you know, minimum viable product.” Back then, the game had the unwieldy subtitle ‘Arena Warfare’, which it jettisoned in time for the open beta launch this July (in retrospect, potentially the game’s “drop the ‘the’” moment). With the full release pushed back indefinitely, that’s the state in which the game currently exists: a perpetual open beta.…

Understanding the twisty release schedule of Splitgate requires almost as much mental gymnastics as navigating the game’s portals. In its two and half years on Steam, the title has never been listed as an Early Access release – the version of the game that first became available on PC in May 2019 was a “soft launch”, Proulx says. “What we viewed it as internally was our MVP – you know, minimum viable product.” Back then, the game had the unwieldy subtitle ‘Arena Warfare’, which it jettisoned in time for the open beta launch this July (in retrospect, potentially the game’s “drop the ‘the’” moment). With the full release pushed back indefinitely, that’s the state in which the game currently exists: a perpetual open beta.…