They’re ”deliberately avoiding” the Western fascination with military-style FPS titles, and Rockstar doesn’t even think of Max Payne 3 as a straight shooter.
”We’re deliberately avoiding that right now,” said Dan Houser, referring to first-person shooters with a backdrop of all out war. ”It’s in our DNA to avoid doing what other companies are doing.” Rockstar has always thumbed their nose at ‘what’s expected’.
”I suppose you could say that Max Payne 3 is something close to an FPS, but there are really unique aspects to the setting and gameplay there, too, not just in the story.”
”You have to have originality in your games; you have to have some kind of interesting message. You could say that the goalpoint of Rockstar is to have the players really feel what we’re trying to do,” continued the Rockstar co-founder.
The Grand Theft Auto maker also doesn’t ever make things to fit a platform; the game comes first and then they pick where it’ll fit best.
”Our mobile strategy is not at all different from our console strategy – in other words, we don’t have one,” continued Dan Houser in an interview.
”Our focus is purely on making games that we can be confident on the quality of. We’ve never made something because we felt it was a business opportunity or because we thought there was some niche in the marketplace we could fill.”
Fear not, Houser believes mobile gaming won’t engulf the games industry. ”I don’t think mobile is going to swallow up video games, but it’s an important topic.”
”The massive phenomenon we saw when portable game systems came out has already spread over the mobile market, but we’ve experienced successes and failures in portables in the past.” He wants to avoid being ‘stuck’ in a particular market, or platform.
”This is my personal opinion, but I think a lot of people in the general mobile industry are more focused on making money than making good products,” he said.
”We’re a business, too – we have to think about how to build revenue and we value the knowledge you need for that, but we want to conduct business with superior products. Focusing on nothing but business is depressing to me; it’s boring. I want people to understand that we make games for more than just to make money.”
Naturally it helps that Rockstar’s videogame offerings have sold mega bucks with Grand Theft Auto IV achieving lifetime sales of over 22 million. Next week Rockstar will be airing the first official trailer for Grand Theft Auto V on November 2nd.
Max Payne 3 releases on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC in March 2012.
