When Bloober Team was given a choice between Blair Witch and Saw, they made a conscious decision to make a Blair Witch game.
At the Polish fair Digital Dragons, IGN had the opportunity to talk about licensed games with the developer Bloober Team.
Bloober Team is known for horror games like The Medium, Blair Witch and Layers of Fear.
CEO Piotr Babieno shared some interesting things about working with film studios and licensors. They have often been approached for the development of games. But the studios apparently always had too precise ideas about the story to accept. You don't work like that.
“I have worked with our good partner, United Talent Agency. We met a lot of industry people in Hollywood. UTA is well known and they have good relationships with all major film studios. We've spoken to [several studios] and some of them came up to us and [said] 'okay guys you're focused on horror and we'd love to work with you guys'. [But] the licensors were very direct: 'We'd love to do this story. We'd like to release the game in 2021 [to coincide with our film launch]," and so on. We decided, 'Okay, [that's] not what we'd like to do.'
Film studio Lionsgate liked Layers of Fear, so they gave Bloober Team a list of horror IPs to choose from, Babieno says. These included the Saw and Blair Witch brands. Blair Witch saw greater potential for telling new stories and went for it.
"Lionsgate came up to us and said, 'Guys, we love [Bloober's hit game] Layers of Fear. We've seen what you're doing with Observer, so we'd love to work with you. We know you'd love to make your own games, so please, this is our list of horror IPs; choose one.' We could have also chosen Saw, which is more popular than Blair Witch, but we chose Blair Witch because the universe offers many opportunities to create something new. That was the reason why we chose this project.”
The developer enjoys a good reputation, because meanwhile one has had to issue refusals again and again for a long time because the studio lacks capacity. You can also expand and work on a third game. But you want to remain independent and create quality.
"To be honest, we always get requests from film studios or other licensors to work with them because Bloober Team is recognizable in some way. Unfortunately we have had to turn down almost everything for almost a year because we don't have the capacity to do more titles at once."
“We could do a third project. We could build [a] bigger team, but we don't want to because we want to focus on the quality and the feeling that [our developers] are still independent in a way [and] still feel that they working on their own title.”
Bloober Team is said to be developing a Silent Hill game for Konami. You should then be busy with that.
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