![]() Now, the console market is flooded with such titles, and Steam is similarly cluttered. The idea that you could spend 10 bucks on a great game without having to leave your couch was still a novelty. Back then, digital downloads on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 were just starting to take off. Housemarque released this video, originally intended for a 'Nex Machina' update, as a thank you to its fans today.Ī lot has changed since Housemarque released its first big hit, Super Stardust HD in 2007. Haveri also spoke of "multiplayer- and service-centered games" being of interest, but wouldn't be more specific. ![]() It's also likely we'll see a shift away from faux-retro voxels to more traditional 3D graphics. ![]() To me, this implies swapping the top-down or side-on views of Nex Machina and Resogun for third-person or first-person cameras. Housemarque hopes to have more to say in the coming months, but its Head of Publishing Mikael Haveri talked about targeting more popular, mainstream genres. It won't be anything like the games the studio is famous for. ![]() Its next game won't be a top-down or side-scrolling shooter. "Are the audience grown up in a way that they are not interested in buying these games?" asked Kuittinen, "Or is it there's lots of competition, lots of titles? Maybe the audience have just moved away from these kind of things." It's now clear to Housemarque that it's time to move on as well. What exactly went wrong is still up for debate. We would have liked to continue down this path, but unfortunately that's not possible." "It was a passionate work of love, and we got to work with our hero, Eugene Jarvis. "We are really proud of what we accomplished with Nex Machina," Housemarque CEO Ilari Kuittinen told Engadget. As it was published by Sony, it hasn't affected Housemarque in the same way financially, but it clearly intensified the soul-searching.īy subscribing, you are agreeing to Engadget's Terms and Privacy Policy. Matterfall, another arcade-inspired title, arrived in August and similarly failed to set the world on fire. The studio has roughly 50 employees working on two games at any given moment, and doing some napkin math will quickly reveal that it lost a lot of money on the game, which it released without the help of a publisher. The company confirmed that it's sold less than 100,000 copies of Nex Machina across both PS4 and PC. When I visited Housemarque's Helsinki studio last year, I described the game as " a Hail Mary for arcade shooters" - and it's now clear that the Hail Mary failed. It received universal praise from reviewers - a Metacritic average of 88 makes it the eighth-best-reviewed PS4 game of the year. Created in partnership with arcade legend Eugene Jarvis, it's fast-paced, devilishly challenging and with tight controls. Nex Machina, a colorful top-down arcade shooter released earlier this year, is pure Housemarque. In recent years, though, good reviews haven't been followed by strong sales. From the early PSN title Super Stardust HD to the PS4 launch savior Resogun, the Finnish studio has produced many critically acclaimed and commercially successful games. Over the past decade, the name Housemarque has become synonymous with arcade-style games.
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