With 2022 being the year of acquisitions, Supermassive Games was purchased by Nordisk last month and is set to remain independent.
In a report released by GamesIndustry this morning, not only will the developer of The Quarry remain independent—akin to other acquisitions such as Sony’s pickups of Bungie and Bluepoint—but the studio may be aiming their sights on different ventures besides the horror titles that have made them a mainstay in the gaming community.
Managing Director Pete Samuels reaffirmed this instance by detailing Supermassive’s plans for the near future. Of course this includes their trademark genre-defining horror titles which started back in 2015 with their break into gaming, Until Dawn, but he also hints at the possibility of jumping into other mediums.
Samuels said, “Those releases are largely geared around growing our audience, which means they require an amount of innovation, and some of that will be in the genre we’re most famous for but also some diversification in the types of games we make. Growing across platforms, genres, media – it’s a big and ambitious plan that Nordisk and ourselves are committed to.” Including:
Nordisk Games is not a games publisher. There’s this tendency when a game studio is acquired to leap to ‘Well, they’re not independent anymore’. If you get acquired by a publisher, that will tend to be the case because you lose the freedom to go and work with any publisher you want to work with – which we haven’t, we still have that flexibility. Or maybe you lose the ability to make games for any platform that you want to, but we still have that independence. If anything, we’re still independent but with more muscle now.
– Pete Samuels, Supermassive Games – GamesIndustry
The Nordisk acquisition allows Supermassive to have a larger entity backing the independent studio so they can focus on doing what they do best. While Samuels also infers how ‘terrifying’ jumping into new ideas and challenges could potentially be along with the risk associated, he also said it could be a rewarding process. Falling under the larger Supermassive Games umbrella grants them the opportunity to explore new avenues, expand ideas, and potentially enter new mediums as a result, but states the company wont stray too far from their signature horror path.
Although nothing new was formally announced from Supermassive Games today, the future seems bright for the already successful company responsible for the Dark Pictures Anthology set to finish its season finale with The Devil In Me scheduled for November. Fans looking for more info can visit the Supermassive Games website with the original July announcement of the Nordisk acquisition.
