The promotional calendar for the games industry is basically organised around two poles. At one end you have the cluster of events orbiting around the black hole where E3 used to be in late May/early June; in theory, that’s where publishers set out their stalls for the following winter, although the tendency to announce things two years or more out from launch has undermined that function somewhat.
At the other end you have the Game Awards in December – ostensibly an awards show (as the name suggests), but in reality an hours-long PR and marketing jamboree where the launch schedule for the next couple of years starts to take shape and the hype cycles for far-off games really kick off.
The Game Awards attracts huge online audiences and provides a fantastic marketing springboard for new games precisely because its format is so focused on trailers and announcements. In the process, it also becomes a moment where you can really reach in and get a read of the industry’s direction and state of mind.
So, what’s the industry’s direction and state of mind right now? Well, to put it in a nutshell, the state of mind is that everyone really, really wants to find the next Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and the direction is whatever way they think will get them there.
I’m not being facetious. Clair Obscur won a ton of awards in this year’s show, as was widely expected, but the most meaningful compliment that could possibly be paid to developer Sandfall and publisher Kepler by their industry peers wasn’t in the form of any statuettes or silverware. Rather, it was in the line-up of trailers and announcements at the show – so many of which were very clearly chasing the scale, ethos, and overall vibes of Clair Obscur.
Trend chasing is nothing new in the games industry, of course – every breakout hit is inevitably followed by a handful of flattering imitators a couple of years later. Often these trends are just a flash in the pan, but sometimes they initiate a much longer-lived sea change, or even birth a whole new genre. (Remember when all first-person shooters used to be called “Doom clones”?)
With Clair Obscur, however, it’s not so much the game itself that’s being emulated – although there will of course be an uptick in turn-based RPGs – but the way in which it was created and marketed.
Sandfall maintains that its budget for Clair Obscur was under $10 million, and while some of the accounting done to reach that figure is debatable (it reportedly excludes the cost of hiring actors like Charlie Cox and Andy Serkis, for example, with the cash for that being stumped up separately by publisher Kepler), the final number is certainly in that ballpark range.
The contrast with skyrocketing budgets for AAA titles is stark. This is true for many indie games, of course, but Clair Obscur sets the cat among the pigeons in this regard by also, for the most part, looking and feeling (and absolutely sounding) like the very best of AAA.
Generally speaking, I’m all for the industry starting to question some of its priors about how much games should cost to develop. Well-managed and scoped projects that implement a clear vision and avoid endless cycles of reworking and feature creep can deliver amazing games within reasonable budgets. That’s easier said than done, since each individual component of that sentence is a major challenge in itself, but it can be done – and now that publishers know it can be done, the dollar signs have lit up in their eyes.
That’s why I said “generally speaking” – there is a caveat here. If publishers want to go out and search for more Little Teams That Could, providing financial backing to small projects in genres traditionally considered risky in the hope of emulating the success of Clair Obscur, that will be a very good thing for the industry overall. If, on the other extreme, this just turns into endless meetings where publishing executives berate their development teams along the lines of “Sandfall built this in a cave with a box of scraps,” all it will ever accomplish is a miserable workplace.
On the evidence of what we’ve seen at the Game Awards, it seems that the actual impact of Clair Obscur’s success on the industry has fallen somewhere in between those examples.
There were some games that felt strongly like major publishers and studios trying to do a more “lean” form of development. That’s an experiment whose success will be determined very much by how willing decision-makers are to accept that this approach can only work if project scopes are clearly defined and managed, and if management plays their part in avoiding feature creep, pivots, and expensive reworks.
Equally, though, there was a crop of games on display from new teams, some of them made up of veteran developers striking out on their own. There were some traditionally indie games in the mix, of course, using things like stylised visuals to clearly set themselves apart from AAA games – but you could also see several games following through on Clair Obscur’s punch and building indie titles with AAA visuals and presentation.
If this does herald an industry-wide swing towards backing smaller projects, Clair Obscur’s mark on the games business will be a very significant one indeed. It won’t replace other trends, of course; the Game Awards also teemed with trailers for nostalgic remakes and big-budget revivals of franchises nostalgically beloved of guys in their forties and fifties. (If you actually did remember the earlier reference to FPS games being called Doom clones, this was a great show for you!)
But there is reason to be cautious of this trend as well. For one thing, I think Clair Obscur’s success may also be one of the driving forces behind a rather less palatable trend that was on display at the Game Awards – the apparent need to get a celebrity name attached to just about any game that you want to bring to market. Kepler’s decision to hire people like Charlie Cox to voice major characters was a solid marketing stroke, but we should pray that it doesn’t presage an era in which developers have to throw a wedge of cash at a Hollywood actor in order to get their game taken seriously.
The hints towards a future where smaller teams and lower budget games are so eagerly sought after were very exciting
The other concern worth bearing in mind is that the lessons of Clair Obscur aren’t just “you can make AAA quality for $10 million if you use UE5 and manage things right.” Managing things right is insanely difficult, for starters; but Clair Obscur also made really smart decisions creatively that were informed by its budget and scope. The team resurrected a genre, turn-based RPGs, that was itself largely defined by the technical limitations of an earlier era. It turned that to its advantage; it embraced limitations that ramped up players’ retro nostalgia for that era of games, while also being very conveniently cost-effective.
That formula may be tricky to apply in many other genres, and the expectation that there’s simply some new approach to development that will uniformly churn out AAA-quality, indie-budgeted titles may end up being pretty damaging if it sets industry expectations badly wrong.
Nonetheless; for all the sequels, remakes, and celebrity namedrops in this year’s Game Awards, the hints towards a future where smaller teams and lower budget games are so eagerly sought after were very exciting. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 may end up being one of the most influential games of the decade – not just for what it was, but for how it was made and what it represents.
