Alan Wake developer Remedy Entertainment’s Oskari Hakkinen has left the studio. He found a new place to be, a mobile game and app startup called Futurefly. This loss is bad, as he was previously head of franchise development at Remedy and has been there for quite some time now. He worked on Death Rally, as well as the first two Max Payne games. He was also one who pushed to convince Microsoft to develop and release Alan Wake for PC, something I’m happy about because otherwise I never would have been able to play.
His new studio consists of nine people and is based in Helsinki. The staff has familiar people, having other ex-Remedy, EA, and Microsoft developers. However, the goal of Futurefly according to Hakkinen is to introduce gameplay into what traditionally would be non-game apps. This isn’t necessarily bad, but this means a shift from developing games for him.
He told VentureBeat, “In early 2015 I came up with a concept that I simply couldn’t let go of and ending up putting together a garage band of developers to bring it to life, working on it in our free time. We are on a mission to disrupt the consumer app space with games on the top of our minds. We are designing consumer apps with playable mechanics as part of the primary input mechanism.” He continued with, “This is a new take, and something that is better shown than talked about. Fortunately, we are well into development of our first installment, so you won’t have to wait too long.”
I’m really on the fence about this. There is a chance this app idea will be great, but apps are apps and not games still. I’d much prefer if he was still making real games. But, I’m happy to hear he is following his dreams and I hope it works well for him. This makes me wonder if his leaving or his side project effected the pushing back of Quantum Break.