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Outriders studio People Can Fly moves into mid-tier game dev

Outriders studio People Can Fly moves into mid-tier game dev

Polish game developer People Can Fly has said that it is going to start working on mid-tier titles alongside its triple-A output.

The firm said that these projects would be "characterized by a shorter development time, lower budget and smaller scope," as opposed to ambitious triple-A releases like Outriders which no doubt required huge budgets and took a long time to make.

Alongside this new strategy, People Can Fly has said that it wants to release a game every single year starting in 2024 and that it is open to acquiring other studios or partnering with developers to this end.

People Can Fly currently runs seven studios around the world. In April of this year, it acquired Chicago's Phosphor Games.

The developer released its most recent project, Outriders, at the start of April. The game attracted 109.5k concurrent users on Steam on its first day and went on to attract 3.5 million players across all platforms within its first month.

Publisher Square Enix has said that Microsoft's Xbox Game Pass subscription service helped Outriders commercial performance.

While People Can Fly partnered with Square Enix for the game, it would seem that relations between the two companies have soured recently. In August, the developer said that Square Enix was withholding royalty payments.

This could well be a factor in why People Can Fly has opted to work on smaller titles. Finnish firm Remedy opted for a similar strategy a few years ago with the aim of being more independent.


PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist who writes about the business of games. He started out at UK trade paper MCV in 2013 and left as deputy editor over three years later. In June 2017, he joined Steel Media as the editor for new site PCGamesInsider.biz. In October 2019 he left this full-time position at the company but still contributes to the site on a daily basis. He has also written for GamesIndustry.biz, VGC, Games London, The Observer/Guardian and Esquire UK.