The video game industry is massive being a 200 billion dollar industry and is steadily growing. One game that caught my attention was Warframe because it is a massive game that has been around for over ten years and was developed in my hometown of London Ontario. This made me curious about how such a large game could get started in a small city like London.
Megan Everett, the community director spoke about the the struggles they faced early on in the game development saying that the studio was on the brink of collapse. The studio had done work for other games to help them with development but after a while, the work started to dry up and they had to do something. They decided they were going to put all their effort into one final game and pitched it to other game studios with little luck because they planned to launch the game free to play. This didn’t discourage the game’s developers from continuing their project and are thankful it became a huge success.
Christian Ramos is a dedicated Warframe player and he said the thing that made him interested in the game was the free-to-play model, as he was a kid when he started playing and couldn’t afford the hefty price of most games at the time. He also was very surprised to find out the game was created in the small town of London Ontario because most games of that calibre required a large studio in a large city.
Greg Kalogeros, the community director of a small game studio also located in London Ontario, gave us some insight on the launch of their game Ember Knights last year. He says that with people more comfortable now with remote working it has allowed video game studios to thrive even if they are from a small city. He also says that their game benefitted from fitting into a certain category and appealing to a specific demographic of gamers.
Find a more detailed look into the topic in the full Almost 107 podcast titled “Big Game, Small City” on 1069thex.com or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
