The Uncertain Future of Immersive Sims

This PC Gamer article talks about the underwhelming sales of the recently released immersive sim games and the possible reasons for that happening, right after a booming resurgence of the genre heralded by BioShock and Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Now, my solution here would be to reclassify immersive sims back to stealth games and spend less resources on making them shiny and tripple-A, but I guess the industry insiders the PC Gamer folks talked to would be a more credible source:

If the future isn’t bright, why is Adam Jensen wearing shades?

Human Revolution and Dishonored both seemed to find an audience beyond traditional immersive sim fans, beyond the people who know to try 0451 in every combination lock just in case. Their success encouraged Eidos Montreal and Arkane to go ahead with big-budget follow-ups, but of course games cost a lot to make, both in terms of time and money, need to justify that with strong sales.

Spector says, “it’s clear that there hasn’t been a huge immersive sim hit on par with some of the other video games out there. I mean, we’re still waiting for the game that sells a gazillion copies! I think part of the reason for that is that immersive sims require—or at least encourage—people to think before they act. They tend not to be games where you just move forward like a shark and inevitably succeed. In the best immersive sims, you have to assess the situation you’re in, make a plan and then execute that plan, dealing with any consequences that follow. That’s asking a lot of players who basically have to do that every moment of their waking lives—in the real world, I mean.”

It wasn’t just immersive sims that didn’t sell as well as expected in 2016, however. Titanfall 2, Street Fighter V, and Watch Dogs 2 also struggled for their own reasons—while big, acclaimed games like Overwatch and Battlefield 1 dominated. Dugas says that “your product needs to be more than ‘GOOD’ today to be successful—whether you are making a movie or a game. People have options and last time I checked there are only 24 hours in a day. If you are not good enough, your audience has gone somewhere else. Bottom line: I believe that if we make outstanding games, no matter what type of genre it is in, people will be there, whether it’s an immersive sim or not.”

Jordan Thomas, who worked on Thief: Deadly Shadows and all three BioShocks before going indie with The Magic Circle, puts it this way. “Are immersive sims suffering specifically in the market or is everybody? I lean more towards the latter. I think the games space is experiencing a new boom and the simpler your concept is to communicate the more likely you are to find your demographic quickly because they’re seeing hundreds and hundreds of concepts at a time. I think that immersive sims traditionally have struggled a little bit with helping people to understand what they’re about because they’re about many things. They’re about a feeling, a cross-section of ideas, whereas a game that is like, ‘No—this is just to quote Garth Marenghi—Balls-to-the-wall horror,’ it’s easier for people to wrap their heads around from a marketing perspective.”

Making games like these is expensive, too. “Looking at something like Prey,” Thomas continues, “everything is just sparkling. The sheer amount of salesmanship that can go into all of the different reactions that the player can concoct with their chemistry set—literally, in that game, but you know what I mean. The idea of objects being combined to some clever result, every single inch of it shines.”

As an indie developer, that level of detail and scope is simply out of reach. “I do think that most indie games that would self-accept the label immersive sim have to compromise because the games that typically are associated with this subgenre were kitchen-sink games.”

Perhaps immersive sims are just a particularly tough sell in a crowded market. The next ones on the horizon—a Dishonored 2 expandalone, a spiritual sequel to Ultima Underworld, and both a new System Shock and a remake of the original—might face the same problem. They all have something else in common, though. They’re all tied directly to existing immersive sims, whether directly or spiritually. None of them are brand new ideas.