Remedy’s Alan Wake was originally conceived as a multiplatform effort before the studio ultimately decided to snap up Microsoft’s exclusivity deal – a move it described as taking the “big, technological effort, the PS3, out of the equation.”
Chatting with CVG, Remedy’s CTO Markus Maki said the decision to forgo a PS3 release shuffled things around from a technology-based risk to one of business.
“Our strategy was one of focus,” explained Maki. “That’s actually a really core Remedy element, well if you forget the ambitious goals we had. We needed to be top notch in some areas, but we knew we couldn’t do everything better than some developers out there. For example, this meant there was no multiplayer. That wasn’t in our core set of skills and it would have been a huge effort.”
“We also took the approach to license middleware that made sense, even when we didn’t end up using it all for one reason or another. And then, the big deal – to go with Microsoft and take one big technological effort, the PS3, out of the equation. That then changed the technology risk to a business risk – but that’s a subject for a different talk altogether…”
Elsewhere, Maki also let slip that Remedy flirted with the idea of utilizing the Unreal Engine during early development, though added it’s happy with the results it subsequently achieved with its proprietary Alan Wake tech.
“We looked at Unreal and other technologies out there, but this was actually before the PS3 and Xbox 360 were ever even released,” he revealed. “We also had all three platforms planned in the beginning – PC, 360 and PS3. I think it’s safe to say now overly optimistic view of the schedule. At that point, we didn’t dare commit to shipping a game on third-party tech until the developers of that tech had shipped a game on each of those platforms.
“Five years later, [I’ll admit] that the reasoning wasn’t solid because these guys beat us to the punch easily.”
Alan Wake would ultimately release as an Xbox 360-exclusive, with a planned PC release also ending up on the cutting room floor. The psychological thriller released in May 2010 to modest sales, with a sequel rumored to be in the pipeline.