Over the years, Housemarque has become known for its fast-paced, oftentimes punishing games like Resogun, and more recently, Returnal and Saros. In an interview with The Game Business, studio CEO and co-founder Ilari Kuittinen and brand director Mikael Haveri spoke about the things they learned from FromSoftware – a studio known for having successfully turned the niche of difficult RPGs into mainstream success.
While the two noted that Housemarque didn’t quite have the same ambitions as FromSoftware, much like the Japanese studio, the Saros developer also wanted to educate players more about the kinds of games it makes.
“FromSoftware have been doing a similar genre for a very long time and built up their fan base [over that period],” said Kuittinen. “We have two unique games out. Returnal, Saros. It’s kind of a new thing that you need to educate the market about, so that people say, ‘Hey, these flow states are really cool.’”
“FromSoftware’s journey from King’s Field to what they are today… We’re not presuming that we would be anywhere close to that,” he continued. “But [like them] we will keep our core, keep educating the market that these are the coolest game you can play. That’s our goal.”
“We will get there step by step,” added Haveri.
Haveri also spoke about how, even though Saros may not have sold many titles so far since its April release, the game still represents “the start of the discussion and conversation with the gaming community.” He went on to say, “If you’ve played Saros, you know that there are a lot of things we can do and tweak and add. We hope that we can keep on doing that for a while.”
“It’s funny, Returnal, when we shipped, it started gaining traction a bit later,” he explained. “A lot of the community got to unlock it a little bit more, and then that tends to trickle down, and people get more interested in it.”
Discussing the growth of Housemarque from its humble days of being 40-50-employees strong during the development of Nex Machina to now having nearly 120 staff members, Kuittinen spoke about how the developer has had to learn how to make bigger experiences, and the organizational challenges this involves.
“It’s quite different jumping into this scale of doing one game at a time with this amount of people. That’s been a big change in the studio to learn how to make these bigger experiences, and how to organize that,” he said. “We attract people who understand our design sensibilities and the things that we are trying to accomplish.”
Saros was released on PS5 earlier this year. For more details, take a look at our review. As for how much players might be enjoying it, check out the stats released by Housemarque, which confirm that, as of the end of May, the game had seen more than 13 million player deaths and 3.08 million boss deaths. The studio also confirmed that the Smart Rifle was the most popular weapon in the game.
As for how it holds up against Returnal, check out the studio’s thoughts about how Saros is meant to be more approachable.
