Recently, InXile Entertainment and Obsidian Entertainment were acquired by Microsoft Studios. Brian Fargo, Studio Head of InXile Entertainment, talked to Eurogamer about the acquisition and what it meant for the studio.
Brian confirmed that the team currently consists of around 70 developers, with 15 contractors. InXile consists of two studios: one in California and one in Louisiana. Brian mentioned that while ‘AA’ games used to be fairly inexpensive to produce, costs have risen over the last few years.
“It’s interesting if you think about 2012, when the crowdfunding revolution happened. You had myself and Double Fine and Obsidian shortly thereafter – and even Larian [Studios] for that matter. The budgets back then were $5m, $6m, so we’d raise $3m from Kickstarter, maybe do another couple of million in Early Access, throw in some more of our money, and you’d be pretty close to having your costs covered.
But since then, the category of what we all consider to be double-A has raised from $15m to $20m in that short period of time. The landscape has changed greatly since then.”
Brian also mentioned that due to being acquired by Microsoft, the team was looking to grow.
“In the short-term we talk about increasing it 30 per cent or so. We’re not trying to become multi-hundred-person teams but just filling the holes we’ve been desperately wanting to: having a full-time audio person, having a full-time lighting person, having a cinematics person – these things that could help us improve what we’re doing.”
Wasteland 3 is currently scheduled to release sometime in late 2019 for PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4. For more information I recommend reading the full interview on Eurogamer right here.
