Last month, I visited Warframe developer Digital Extremes’ office in London, Ontario, of Canada, to hang out with the team behind Soulframe for a couple of days, interview its various discipline leads, and learn about this studio’s first game in nearly a decade. It was during those initial interviews that I learned Soulframe was a game Digital Extremes committed to making before asking its “corporate overlords,” which is Tencent, the Chinese-based megagiant publisher that acquired Leyou, the company that owned a majority stake in the developer.
In the words of Digital Extremes CEO Steve Sinclair, the team begged for forgiveness (instead of asking for permission).
During my first interview with Sinclair and Co., he showed Game Informer senior video editor Alex Van Aken and I the slide deck he used two years prior to pitching Soulframe to Tencent. Now, anyone familiar with Soulframe, the fantasy MMO that’s available to play in an alpha state today, will know it was revealed at TennoCon in 2022… four years ago. You do the math.
“This is the slide deck I used two years ago for Tencent,” Sinclair tells me. “Because yeah, you’re supposed to – what do you call this, ‘Ask for permission or beg forgiveness?’ Yeah, this was the beg forgiveness. We already kind of said, ‘Here it is! Sign up!’ [And they were like,] ‘Hey guys, do you want to tell us what this is about?’”
Sinclair says Tencent was “cool” about it, though, as you might infer from the game’s continued early access program and success. He tells me the reason Soulframe exists is because in 2016, a person in Digital Extremes’ statistics department [Editor’s Note: Sinclair says they are no longer with the studio, adding they chose to leave] said “Warframe was declining and sunsetting, and it was time to face that fact that it would be over soon and that we needed something new, otherwise we’d be doomed.”
“And of course, as we have seen, somehow impossibly, that was not true at all,” he continues. “Two years later, we hit an all-time high with [the Plains of Eidolon expansion] release, and then last year, we beat that. So Covid ups and downs, and with [Warframe creative director Rebecca Ford] leading the Warframe ship, it has achieved new, new highs.”
Soulframe creative director and former Warframe art and animation director Geoff Crookes says this line of thinking among the aforementioned statistics department employees was common wisdom back then – in 2016 – and that trends have changed, meaning live-service games can last much longer than anticipated with proper support.
Because Soulframe is the latest game to grace the cover of Game Informer, we’ll be posting behind-the-scenes stories like this alongside exclusive videos and more for the next few weeks. If you aren’t subscribed to Game Informer, you have until April 22 to do so and ensure a copy of this issue reaches your mailbox. Plus, anyone subscribed will be receiving a Soulframe Preludes code to check out the game early. More information about codes can be found here.
For more exclusive Soulframe insight, head to our hub here.