Amazing success of Skyrim an inspiration to Alan Wake dev

Amazing success of Skyrim an inspiration to Alan Wake dev
James Orry Updated on by

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The amazing success of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim – 10 million sales and counting – has convinced Alan Wake developer Remedy that it is worth persisting with the development of games with a strong focus on storytelling.

“The Call of Dutys and the Battlefields are doing extremely well in the US,” Remedy head of franchise development Oskari Hakkinen told Eurogamer. “Those are the type of games that are in popular demand, so it’s really positive to see Skyrim and other RPG games that have a lot of story in be successful as well.

“It gives us motivation to do story-driven games, because there’s obviously an audience out there of people who enjoy story as well.

“Seeing something like that being successful, we don’t need to consciously try to make our stories any less than they are, not try to make them any simpler. Our stories are not necessarily complicated, but our games are very story heavy. And, just to see games like Skyrim succeed, it’s like, let’s not try to make it any less story-heavy.”

Skyrim was 2011’s second biggest money maker behind Modern Warfare 3.

Linking Skyrim to the popularity of story-based video games seems an odd one to us. Skyrim’s success is primarily thanks to its open world nature and freedom, which other games can’t offer, not its amazing storytelling.