If you haven’t watched NoClip’s excellent two-part documentary about Digital Extremes’ sci-fi MMO shooter, Warframe, I highly recommend doing so. For the purpose of this story, that documentary is a great primer for the struggles the studio endured leading up to the launch of Warframe. But now, more than a decade and some change later, Warframe is still kicking, breaking its own playercount records as recently as last year.
The secret to that success, and the success Digital Extremes has found thus far with Soulframe, is keeping the amount of public scrutiny as high as possible, according to Digital Extremes CEO Steve Sinclair, who is also highly involved in the development of both MMOs.
“I think you guys probably have seen, even this year, really big table stake things coming out without necessarily facing sustained criticism, sustained engagement, and then imploding quickly,” Sinclair tells me. Highguard shut down the same week I visited Digital Extremes for this Game Informer cover story. “And the table stakes are so high, the investment, the dollars are so eye-wateringly large, they can’t, they don’t have enough runway to try and fix the problems.”
Sinclair says that because Warframe was made in a year under the threat of impending layoffs, lost contracts with publishers, and ultimately, the possibility of Digital Extremes’ closure, it was designed for a specific audience. That paid off, as Warframe remains a success today. “And when we were starting Soulframe, I think there was a large degree of skepticism that you can even do that anymore, but I would argue that you can’t afford not to,” Sinclair says. “You can’t afford to have a server bash one weekend and then the next week, it will go out, and if it doesn’t work in one week, we can’t afford the servers, so we’re dead and we’re done.
“And so everything that we’ve done is to try to keep the team as small as possible, to keep the amount of public scrutiny as high as possible, and to keep going through that cycle to test our theories against how our audience is going to react.”
That method has worked for Warframe, but it remains to be seen if Soulframe will find the same success – that will depend on the community playing it today. And if you didn’t know, you can join that community by subscribing to Game Informer by April 22 because all subscribers will be receiving a Soulframe Preludes code to check out the game early! More information about codes can be found here.
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