Space Marine 2 CCO enforced “affordable” development to avoid Concord-like failure

Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2 is one of the biggest successes in years, beating out DOOM sales and making story DLC possible. While developer Saber Interactive has already started work on a new Avatar game instead of Space Marine 3, COO Tim Willits is keen to continue the studio’s mantra of affordable development.

After revealing the fight to keep the game’s Necron tease and announcing the new October operation, Saber is still hard at work on post-launch content for the game. However, the team is very keen to avoid the failings of other live-service games such as Suicide Squad and, more recently, Concord.

Saber knew how to make Space Marine 2 work 

While Space Marine 2 sales are far higher than Saber anticipated, Tim Willits revealed that the team knew not to over-scope the project during development. This did lead to compromises, such as keeping all three co-op players together during missions, but also meant that the team didn’t have massive sales targets to hit to break even. 

“We don’t need to sell four million units to make it [Space Marine 2] a success,” Willits told IGN in a recent interview. “There are many games, sadly, especially out of North American developers, where if you do not sell five million copies you are a failure. I mean, what business are we in where you fail if you sell less than five million?”

Willits explained that games like Saber’s Snowrunner followed the same mantra, delivering a focused experience that sold over 15 million copies. The studio’s last AAA project, World War Z, managed to rake in 25 million players and received five years of post-launch content. 

Instead of cramming countless viral mechanics into a single game like, say, Concord’s hero shooter design or the scrapped Halo battle royale, the team focused on providing a solid gameplay structure that played well. 

“One of the things that we try to do at Saber… we focus on the moment-to-moment interaction in the gameplay and the feeling you have,” Willits explained. “Then we adhere to our core pillars, like be the ultimate Space Marine, melee, ranged, swarms, that’s it. A lot of teams throughout development will over-scope games. They look at some other game that just came out and say, ‘oh, we got to do that, let’s add this, we got to do this.’ And they lose focus on the core, what actually makes the game fun.”

A new look on development 

Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2 has sold like hotcakes with over 2 million players on launch day. While there are some minor issues like lower-than-expected texture quality (which is being fixed soon) and some unbalanced classes, Saber has achieved its goal of creating the perfect Xbox 360 game. 

With the game even managing to revitalise Warhammer stores and sell miniatures to a new audience, it’s clear that the game is a massive success. Hopefully, we’ll continue to see Saber’s take on the Grim Dark sci-fi universe for years to come.