It will deliver something ”unique and new to the table” in gaming terms. Also the CEO says Starbreeze are ”never going to do free-to-play” as it’s costly and hard to ”cater to everyone”.
Instead the independent developer will most likely pursue ‘cheap to play’ titles although they aren’t going to be placing all their eggs in one basket business model-wise.
”We’re never going to do free-to-play, because then you have to cater to everyone out there - that’s costly and it’s hard,” explained Mikael Nermark. ”We’re probably going to go down the road of cheap to play. Would we go all out? No, I don’t think I’m going to bet on just one business model.” This is in contrast to Crytek’s F2P planned future.
”I mean, we did only work for hire for a time, and we’re not going to leave that, or the triple-A space, but we’re going to keep that and do the smaller, downloadable self-funded stuff like P13 and Payday 2 and we’re going to dabble in other areas too. Multiple different business models, multiple different games. To rely on one business model is very risky.”
Starbreeze announced Cold Mercury back in March which they class as ‘cheap-to-play’. In April they acquired Payday developer Overkill Software, who are now working on Left4Dead content.
