Destiny’s biggest rival Warframe has had ‘two years of massive growth

What the report says

Listen now on Apple, Spotify or YouTubeIn This Edition,Digital Extremes’ Sheldon Carter on…Warframe’s ‘massive’ growthSoulframe’s careful developmentThe death of Destiny‘Trust-based development’Bungie’s ‘looter shooter’ Destiny was a real thorn in the side of Warframe.The Digital Extremes game had launched 18 months earlier, and found itself facing off against a better resourced rival.“There’s a lot of overlap between the two games,” says Digital Extremes president Sheldon Carter.“Destiny 1 really hit us when it came out. It’s a looter shooter with tons of marketing and really great developers on the team. Destiny 2 as well.”In May this year, Bungie announced the end of Destiny.

It would no longer be making updates to the series. And since then, most of the Destiny team has been laid off.“For a while we thought about [Destiny] as competition and we were aggressively wanting to compete with what they’re doing. But over time, developers from their team come onto our team. New people who we started, they learnt what looter shooters are because they’ve put thousands of hours into Destiny. And so, at our studio, it was a bit of mourning with that news. The mood was pretty dour.“The budgets and the competition to keep putting updates out… it’s really difficult and every studio has its own culture and different way of doing things.

I can’t imagine [what it’s like] with a studio as big as Bungie, which also had Marathon going on, and a lot of different things pulling them in a lot of directions. Honestly, for me, it’s more sadness that it’s over. I hope the best for all the people there.”Warframe is in a very different position. Five years ago, Digital Extremes felt that the game had peaked and it began work on a new game, a multiplayer RPG called Soulframe.“Some people in the company were like, ‘Oh, Warframe’s peaked. And as it gradually goes to the West, we will have to start something new.” And while we did start another project, we changed our focus about how we were developing Warframe, how we were promoting it, and we’ve had a few years of straight just massive growth.“Now we’re in this happy position where Warframe’s really thriving, and that gives us the ability to give Soulframe a tone of rope to try stuff out.”Sponsor MessageGame Development, built to scaleKeywords Studios is the games industry’s end-to-end partner, with over 13,000 people across 26 countries helping studios build, launch and grow games at global scale.

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Supercharged by technology and shaped by long-term partnership, Keywords Studios connects specialist expertise around the player experience.For game development, that means flexible production support that scales with ambition. From co-development and engineering to live operations and technical delivery, Keywords Studios helps teams move faster, solve complexity and keep production connected, without losing sight of the game players are waiting for.‘Trust-based development’Although Warframe lacks the profile of Destiny, the game and its studio is still a significant operation. Digital Extremes, which is owned by Tencent, now has over 500 staff.So, what’s the secret?

The answer is a boring one, and one you’d expect any live service developer to say: it’s about community.Digital Extremes says it has a “trust-based development philosophy”, which involves continued communication and reacting quickly when mistakes are made. It’s not something that comes naturally to most studios, but it’s something that the Warframe team has mastered. It no doubt helps that the game’s creative director Rebecca Ford was previously its community director. And when you have the trust of players, they can do “great things” for you, says Carter.“Warframe has always felt like a bit of an underdog story.

It’s one of those games that’s been big for a long time, but not a lot of people know about it. That makes our players really want to bring other people into their hobby. And when you know that you’re taken care of and you’re excited about it, you want to share it with others.”Sign-up to The Game Business for free!‘There’s still growth on consoles’Warframe is now on most platforms, and Digital Extremes is eyeing up new markets in which to push the game. However, it believes there is plenty of growth in some of the more mature areas.“The last two years of Warframe have been our biggest growth period,” Carter says.“Of course, we look at new geographies.

More from the announcement

We just launched on Android a few months ago, and Android opens a whole bunch of geographies and a whole set of players that we’ve never been able to interact with.