The gaming industry's advertising calendar is mainly organized along two poles. At one end you see a group of events orbiting the black hole where E3 was located in late May/early June; in theory, this is where publishers set up their stalls for the following winter, although the trend of announcing releases two or more years before launch has somewhat undermined this feature.
At the other end, you have the Game Awards in December – ostensibly an awards show (as the name suggests) but really a hours-long PR and marketing party where the launch schedule for the next couple of years begins to take shape and the hype cycles for distant games really begin.
The Game Awards attract a huge online audience and provide a fantastic marketing platform for new games precisely because its format is focused on trailers and announcements. In the process, it also becomes a moment where you can really get a sense of the direction and mood of the industry.
So what is the direction and state of mind in the industry now? In short, the state of mind is that everyone really, really wants to find the next Claire Obscurus: Expedition 33, and the direction is whatever they think will take them there.
I'm not kidding. Claire Obscurus won a ton of awards at the show this yearAs many expected, the most meaningful compliment that Sandfall developer and Kepler publisher could receive from their industry peers didn't come in the form of any statues or silverware. Rather, it was in a number of trailers and announcements for the show, many of which clearly pursued the scope, spirit and overall atmosphere of Clair Obscur.
Of course, trend-chasing is nothing new in the games industry: every breakthrough hit is inevitably followed by a handful of fawning imitators a couple of years later. Often these trends are just a blip, but sometimes they cause much longer lasting dramatic changes or even give birth to an entirely new genre. (Remember when all first-person shooters were called “Doom clones”?)
In Clair Obscur's case, however, it's not so much the game itself that's being emulated (though there will certainly be a surge in turn-based RPGs), but rather the way it was made and marketed.
Sandy waterfall supports that his budget for Claire Obscurus was less than $10 million, and while some of the calculations done to arrive at that figure are controversial (they reportedly exclude the cost of hiring actors like Charlie Cox and Andy Serkis, for example, and the money for that is paid separately by publisher Kepler), the final figure is definitely in that ballpark range.
The contrast with the skyrocketing budgets for AAA games is stark. Of course, this is true of many indie games, but Clair Obscur puts the cat among the pigeons in this regard, and in large part due to its look and feel (and absolutely sound) as the best of AAA.
Generally speaking, I'm all for the industry starting to ask how much it should cost to develop games. Well-managed, ambitious projects that implement a clear vision and avoid endless cycles of rework and feature expansion can create amazing games on reasonable budgets. This is easier said than done, since each individual component of this proposal is a major challenge in itself, but it can be done—and now that the publishers know it can be done, dollar signs lit up in their eyes.
That's why I said “generally speaking” – there is a caveat here. If publishers want to go out and look for more “Little Teams That Could” financial support for small projects in genres traditionally considered risky, in hopes of emulating the success of Clair Obscur, which would be very good for the industry as a whole. If, on the other hand, it just turns into endless meetings where publishing execs berate their development teams along the lines of “Sandfall built it in a cave with a box of scraps,” all it will ever lead to is a terrible workplace.
Based on what we saw at the Game Awards, it appears that the actual impact of Clair Obscur's success on the industry falls somewhere in between these examples.
There were some games that looked a lot like big publishers and studios trying to use a more “lean” form of development. This is an experiment whose success will largely depend on how willing decision makers are to recognize that this approach can only work if the scope of the project is clearly defined and managed, and if management plays its part to avoid feature creep, pivots and costly rework.
However, at the same time, many games were introduced from new teams, some of which consisted of experienced developers working on their own. Of course, there were a few traditionally indie games in the mix that used things like stylized visuals to clearly differentiate themselves from AAA games, but you could also see a few games that followed the success of Claire Obscura and created indie games with AAA visuals and presentation.
If this does mark an industry-wide shift towards supporting smaller projects, Claire Obscura's impact on the games business will be very significant indeed. Of course, this won't replace other trends; The Game Awards were also full of trailers for nostalgic remakes and big-budget revivals of franchises nostalgically beloved by guys in their forties and fifties. (If you really did remember the earlier mention of first person shooters being called Doom clones, that was a great show for you!)
But there are reasons to be wary of this trend. Firstly, I think the success of Clair Obscur may also be one of the driving forces behind a rather less pleasant trend that was on display at the Game Awards – the apparent need to attach a celebrity name to almost any game you want to bring to market. Kepler's decision to hire people like Charlie Cox to voice the main characters was a solid marketing move, but we have to pray that it doesn't foreshadow an era where developers will have to invest a ton of money into a Hollywood actor in order for their game to be taken seriously.
The hints at a future where smaller teams and smaller budget games are so eagerly sought out were very exciting.
Another issue to keep in mind is that the lessons from Clair Obscur aren't simply that “you can achieve AAA quality for $10 million if you use UE5 and manage everything right.” To begin with, managing things properly is insanely difficult; but also Claire Obscur made really smart and creative decisions based on his budget and scope. The team revived the turn-based role-playing game genre, which itself was largely defined by the technical limitations of the previous era. It turned it to its advantage; it included restrictions that reinforced players' retro nostalgia for that era of gaming, while at the same time being very user-friendly and cost-effective.
This formula may be difficult to apply in many other genres, and the expectation that there is simply some new development approach that will uniformly produce AAA-quality games on indie budgets can end up being quite damaging if it falls far short of industry expectations.
Nevertheless; For all the sequels, remakes and big name names at the Game Awards this year, the hints at a future where smaller teams and lower budget games are eagerly sought after were very exciting. Claire Obscur: Expedition 33 may end up being one of the most influential games of the decade – not just because of what it was, but because of how it was made and what it represents.
