After more than two decades at Firaxis Games (Sid Meier’s Civilization, XCOM, Marvel’s Midnight Suns), Jake Solomon has left his old job to start a new studio.

The year 2023 was both good and bad for the gaming industry. There were several AAA games that were considered successful, but in the meantime the budget was blown (it reportedly cost Sony more than $300 million to develop Marvel’s Spider-Man 2), which did not have a good effect on profits. In February, Hiroki Totoki, Sony’s chief operating officer and interim chairman of Sony Interactive Entertainment, said that a more aggressive multiplatform strategy (i.e., PC ports cannot be delayed for too long) was needed to improve operating profits.

Xbox CEO Phil Spencer said that the industry needs to find more new consumers to get back on a growth path (but they will inevitably reach a limit…), and they’ve started to multiplatform more Xbox exclusives (which is how Sea of Thieves came to PlayStation 5, for example), but they’ve also closed several studios (Tango Gameworks, Arkane Austin, Alpha Dog Games, all three under Bethesda). And because of that, things aren’t looking so good, which Solomon addressed in an interview with WCCFTech. He is now developing a narrative-centric life simulator at Midsummer.

“The state of the industry is really terrible. Too many people have lost their jobs and it’s incredibly frustrating. It’s been nice to actually hire people in the last few months. The last few months have been terrible for a lot of people, and hopefully as Midsummer grows we can give some of them a great studio home. It’s a tough market right now. You have these incredible, over-the-top AAAA games that are impossible to follow. You also see amazing niche AA games that are more focused and successful. AAA is in that awkward middle ground where it’s very expensive but hard to break even.

I’m careful not to tell other people how to run their business. But I can tell you what we’re doing at Midsummer. We want to make games in a small, collaborative atmosphere. We want to stay independent. All of these things require that we stay relatively small, that we act and spend our money in a sustainable way, and that we make careful decisions about how we produce our games,” Solomon said.

At least he has a decent approach to his project.

Source: WCCFTech