With the studio behind Tales of Kenzera: Zau going public in its search for a publisher in a bid to avoid potential layoffs, the public face of the company has shared his thoughts on what led it there.
Speaking at this year’s SXSW Sydney, CEO and actor Abubakar Salim placed the blame for the move at the feet of the traditional model of game development.
“We have to kinda break the old way of making games,” he argued.
“A lot of the time we are told ‘Oh yeah, you just keep growing, get bigger and get bigger and get bigger,” Salim said, adding that this sentiment was something they heard from its publisher EA concerning its debut title.
“You’ve got to pitch bigger, you’ve got to grow bigger and funnily enough... it’s that that has led us to this scenario and the area we are in today,” he said.
In a statement released overnight, the UK-based developer revealed that it had put its staff “on notice" for redundancy.
Despite that uncertainty, Salim reiterated his commitment to “create stuff that I feel is honest, fun and truthful” in a more clever way rather than going for growth at all costs.
“It doesn’t need to be like The Last Of Us or what-not. Let them do that. Let them conquer that kind of realistic story. We just need to focus on the artistic elements of it and celebrate that,” he said.
“How that looks — obviously — is a smaller team. It's a leaner team. It’s a good rate of production but it’s a slower growth rather than this idea that we can go from a five million game to like a twenty-five million dollar game, which was very much the track that we were following and it doesn't feel right,” he said.
In the statement it released on social media, Surgent announced that it had developed a prototype for its next project and was seeking a partner to move forward into full production.
"It’s darker, edgier, and more visceral than our first game, but it retains all ZAU’s high-octane combat and cultural depth. And we’re looking for a partner," it said.
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