‘We actually made things more efficient with the sequel, which was a bigger success commercially and on Metacritic.’
At a Glance
- IO Interactive CEO Hakan Abrak says lower budgets on Hitman 2 and 3 have made the studio sustainable.
Video game studio sustainability is a tough nut to crack. Projects can have extremely high up-front costs—often funded by investors or publishers—and generate the bulk of their revenue in the short window after release. That means there are long periods where studios burn overhead while little money comes in. The problem is exacerbated if a publisher has a high revenue share or loans need to be paid back.
Balancing that equation is a key task as the game industry looks to recover from years of mass layoffs and studio closures, especially for triple-A studios. IO Interactive CEO Hakan Abrak says there's one strategy that's helped the Hitman World of Assassination studio become stable: deliberately producing sequels with lower budgets than the original game.
Abrak laid out this strategy in a late-November conversation with Game Developer while discussing IO Interactive's ongoing live support for World of Assassination. The studio drives interest (and revenue) through regular updates, including its celebrity-driven "Elusive Target" missions. But before it could enter that cycle, it had to produce the three Hitman games now united under the World of Assassination banner.
To do so, Abrak said the company deliberately produced 2018's Hitman 2 and 2021's Hitman 3 on lower budgets than than 2016 game Hitman, which cost about $70 million (Abrak previously disclosed these budget numbers on the Game Makers Notebook podcast). "The investment in Hitman 2016, the start of World of Assassination, was a sizable investment," he explained, noting the company maintains its own bespoke game engine called Glacier. "But Hitman 2, which had a higher Metacritic [score] took half of the time and cost almost half of the budget" (around $40 million).He said the sequel was also a bigger commercial success, driving higher returns for IO Interactive.
This is in contrast to other triple-A projects at companies like Sony Interactive Entertainment, where sequels like The Last of Us Part II and Horizon Forbidden West cost more than double their predecessors to produce despite existing gameplay and technological foundations.
Hitman 3 was then produced in just under two years, earned the highest Metacritic score of the three games, and cost $20 million, close to a quarter of Hitman's budget. "That's the philosophy—the initial investment is very important and is risky, but how you build on the revolution of that, of making an exciting competitive product, instead of always thinking 'oh, I need to reinvent the revolution every time.'"
IO Interactive's sustainability journey had plenty of speed bumps
IO Interactive "building on the revolution" of Hitman culminated in a choice not available to many developers—binding its three games into effectively one product, creating a kind of Voltron game that benefits from regular updates. It's an innovative approach that's not necessarily available to all studios.
And while it's true that Hitman 2 and Hitman 3 cost less than their predecessor to develop, the studio faced other hurdles along the way. In 2017 former parent company Square Enix divested from the studio and sold it back to company management. The studio laid off several developers and scaled back the scope of Hitman 2 after losing key financial resources.
The transition from the Hitman trilogy to the new collected Hitman collection also came with trial and error. When Hitman 3 debuted on PC exclusively on the Epic Games Store, IO Interactive wasn't initially prepared to let players who'd purchased Hitman and Hitman 2 on Steam access promised content. A similar controversy rose up a year later when the game was released on Steam. Bundling the three games into the World of Assassination product eventually cleared up these issues, ensuring all players received the same amount of content when purchasing the base game.
This is all to say that even with a strong production plan, developers following in IO Interactive's footsteps should watch out for the rocks it's already stumbled on. Lucky for the studio, it survived those stumbles and is restarting the process again with heavy up-front R&D on 007 First Light and its unnamed fantasy game called "Project Fantasy."