10 Video Games Probably Made Out Of Spite
8. Returnal
The recently-released PS5 roguelike shooter Returnal delivers one of the most impressive developer glow-ups in recent gaming history, as Finnish outfit Housemarque went from developing more modest shooters like Resogun and Nex Machina to an insanely ambitious, critically acclaimed third-person shooter which Sony considers a "mega-hit."
As great as Returnal is, though, it's clear that Housemarque's decision to move away from niche retro-styled shooters towards something closer in style to Dark Souls wasn't something they did by choice.
Back in 2017, Housemarque co-founder and CEO Ilari Kuittinen spoke bluntly about the commercial underperformance of their most acclaimed titles, namely the raved-about Nex Machina, before confirming the company would be no longer developing arcade-y shooters:
"We know from those numbers that quite a lot of people have played those games, but I think it's more that they don't want to pay for them. They expect to get them for free... Actually, Super Stardust HD sold more for PlayStation 3 [ten years ago], when it had a fraction of the owners that PlayStation 4 has now with Nex. So maybe those people have just moved on. They are not active in the market any more.
The core thing is that there's no paying audience for games like this. Or we can't reach them, and I don't know how those people can be reached if they haven't heard about our games [already]... We would love to have continued developing Nex Machina for years to come, to support the audience that has been loyal to us. But unfortunately there is not enough of those guys."
Kuittinen took his frustration with the industry and developed a larger-scale, more mainstream-skewing product which resonated with a large swath of players.
As a cherry on top, Returnal's success led to Housemarque being acquired by Sony just two months after its release. Talk about a happy ending.