“A creative idea can save more money than AI can right now” – Glen Schofield on his retirement, Callisto Protocol’s development, and the state of AAA

During the summer, veteran developer Glen Schofield announced his retirement from the games industry.

He’d had an enviable career, spanning all the way back to 1992’s Barbie: Game Girl. He would later head the Call of Duty studio Sledgehammer Games, and he has also held prominent positions at the likes of Crystal Dynamics and EA’s Visceral studio. His last position was leading Striking Distance Studios under Korean giant Krafton.

Now, he is spending his days making art. Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz from his garage-slash-studio, Schofield shows off some of his recent work – epoxy skulls, a beautiful stylised painting of a sports car, and a piece of driftwood that’s going to become a whale.

He might have retired from making games, but whatever creative force drove Schofield through his career is still whirring away inside his skull.

“I’m torn between am I just going to paint and sculpt, go off and create this other career which I don’t really need,” he says. “Or do I want to continue in video games?”

Schofield’s last hurrah in gaming was The Callisto Protocol in 2022. It was a sci-fi survival horror title in the same vein as his previous work on Dead Space – although he’s emphatic that the game wasn’t a spiritual successor to that project. The team was about six months into The Callisto Protocol when COVID hit.

This was massively disruptive to development. Or as Schofield puts it, “COVID was a real pain in the ass”.

“We had to learn on the job and just change everything,” he says. “We got it done and everything. We saw the problems that we had. A lot of them were caused by Korean management.”

The shift to remote working was also something that Schofield struggled with. In the past, he says that he liked being in a studio environment, seeing what everyone was up to and talking to them in person. In a remote setting, that’s much harder.

“I’m a creative leader, and I’m a business leader,” he explains. “But that doesn’t mean that I want to do the business, and it doesn’t mean that I want to schedule everything. I hate that shit. Just point me in the direction and let me do the creative leadership that I need to do.”

“When you have a studio of a hundred people, you can touch a hundred people a day. When they’re at home, you have to do individual calls, or I could get everybody together on Zoom. But we did it. We did all these things because we were searching for the best way to do it. There were so many meetings.”

“But when you’re in the studio, I’m seeing them every single day. I miss that. It’s very important to have that; that’s how younger people move up. That’s how you get advice every single day. So I will work on games; I just don’t like [remote working]. I’ll come in and help, but I don’t want to spend eight hours a day on Zoom.”

Early release

Schofield might not have been a fan of remote working, but he and Striking Distance managed to struggle through it in order to get The Callisto Protocol over the line. The straw that broke the camel’s back, however, was Krafton’s decision to launch the project in December 2022, months before the March 2023 release date he said he had been promised. The extra months were meant to make up for some of the disruption caused by COVID.

“I was so stunned by that decision, because we had fucking COVID”

The pandemic not only forced people to adjust to working remotely, it also put entire teams out of commission after they fell sick. This resulted in the original vision of The Callisto Protocol being pared down a little bit; some bosses were cut, levels were removed, and even an enemy or two was pulled.

“I was forced to ship the game. I’m mad at myself, there’s no doubt. I was so stunned by that decision, because we had fucking COVID,” he says. “A million people died in America. I lost one of my best friends. Every single month, four to six people in my company were getting sick. There were times our small team in Spain was shut down; it goes through a small place like that and you lose your rendering team for a while. The main thing you’re concerned about, not that you aren’t normally, is the health of your team. Making a game just became secondary because this is about life. This is about humanity.”

(GamesIndustry.biz has reached out to Krafton for comment, and we will update this article if we receive a response.)

Further complicating things was the fact that Krafton did not have a publishing or marketing team to release a single-player physical experience, so Striking Distance built this functionality internally at the studio. Then there was the mandate to release The Callisto Protocol on PlayStation 5 as well as PlayStation 4, something that would cost “another $20 million”. That added the complication of sending out development kits to 200 staff at a point in time where there was a shortage of computer chips.

“They thought Callisto was a complete failure”

The Callisto Protocol launched to mixed reviews and fell short of Krafton’s expectations.

“They thought Callisto was a complete failure,” Schofield says. “What they didn’t know while all they were doing was complaining, we were doing patches. I waited until I finished all the DLC and put out 86 patches. That was a lot of fucking work. Every day you’re going in, you’re making changes. Some are little, others are massive. That was all to get it back to where it needed to be.”

There was a pitch for a second Callisto Protocol game, though Krafton was not interested after the performance of the original. This second project would have been bigger in scale; as Schofield puts it, the first game was an outbreak; the second would be a plague. The setting was going to be a giant space station where ships docked over the course of hundreds of years, resulting in a “giant junkyard” of spacecraft.

“Over the years, different things have warped into one crazy freaking place,” Schofield says. “You go anywhere, and there are ships and stuff. That was just part of it. That’s where the outbreak would start. We had a lot of drawings and a lot of some of the stuff that didn’t get in the first game was going to be in this one.”

End of an era

In 2023, Schofield left Striking Distance.

Earlier this year, Schofield posted to LinkedIn saying that it was “tough” and “bittersweet” to see the state of US publishing giants Activision Blizzard and Electronic Arts. The former was sold to Microsoft in a record-breaking $69.7 billion deal, while the latter has been taken private by a consortium of investors led by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund for $55 billion. Asked if he thinks a chapter of the games industry is coming to a close, Schofield agrees.

“Everybody has a feeling that it was AI, but the writing was on the wall with these companies being sold,” Schofield explains. “There was a change in the guard. Phil Spencer and Bobby Kotick, all these people and many more are out now. I mean, that whole Activision layer of people that I worked with are all gone.”

“What I’ve seen is some of the big creative people marginalised”

As Schofield sees it, there has been a shift from creative being the focus of the top publishers.

“What I think has been lost in all of this is money has come up as the most important thing,” he says. “I understand money. We have to make money. You can still make a lot of money because the games industry is only going to grow. What I’ve seen is some of the big creative people marginalised. They need to flip the switch again and give the creatives a seat at the table. They don’t even have a seat at the table anymore. I think that investors don’t know how to hire creative people.”

Despite working on some of the biggest games brands in existence, Schofield says that they were always games to him, not AAA or whatever buzzword of choice you have. But he does say that the cost of making these games has risen too high and, in fact, he finds himself yearning for a simpler time.

“We were in an arms race to see who could have the best graphics, the best special effects, the best sound,” he says. “There was this massive push over the last 20 years. We said it is going to cost more and more, but I do want to play a game that immerses me, because it looks and feels so real, or I’m in a world that doesn’t glitch.

“I would love to go back and make myself like a $70 million game”

“People aren’t thrilled about AAA games right now, and basically it’s budget. It’s because of the money. I’d be so happy to make a game for less than $150 million. I went from Dead Space, which cost $28 million to make, to Call of Duty and somewhere along the line people said we made AAA games. I never called myself AAA until everybody just said it after a while. It was just a game. I would love to go back and make myself like a $70 million game, because it means a smaller, tighter team and maybe not as much spread out outsourcing. It means more cohesion to me.”

So how would he do this? To make a blockbuster on that kind of budget, he revisits an idea he floated as a way to get Dead Space 4 made back at Gamescom Asia x Thailand Game Show while speaking to IGN.

“A creative idea can save more money than AI can right now,” he says. “I have a great example. This is a really big idea I have for a particular game, but I was trying to think how to save money: reuse stuff from the older games. It’s just a really creative way of reusing it; like it’s part of the story. At the end of the day, I believe it would have saved me about $25 million on this game. Now your costs are down to about $60 million for what we used to think was AAA.”

The AI question

While Schofield says AI can save less money than a good idea, he is an advocate for the technology, but refuses to see it as a tool.

“Midjourney has become a medium for me. I paint, I draw, I do AI, I use Photoshop, I photobash,” he says. “These are techniques and things you pick up along the way. It wasn’t a tool for me. I thought I had to think differently about this. I never looked at 3D as a tool when we made 2D games.

“So I started thinking about how I’d use it. Now I have ideas on how I’ll bring you the newest camera you’ve ever felt, You’re not going to be able to do everything in it. You’re going to have to do what we used to do in games, which is like we’re making a racing game, we’re gonna take this engine. We’re gonna make a racing module, a physics module, a water module; I’m going to do the same with AI. I’m going to put my money on a few places that make sense to my game and to my story, and that’s where I’m gonna excel. That brings AI into the creative fold.”

He concludes it’s about using AI in select areas where it makes sense. “It’s like: ‘Put AI to work’. Fix collisions. Let’s make cameras better.”