Forget Games Copying Fortnite. Director Josef Fares Thinks The Trend Hurts Creativity
“That is f***ed up.”
When video games launch to great success, the studios behind them are often pressed to make more of the same. Sometimes they’re even driven to continue working on those games indefinitely, adding more expansions and updates until demand slows — what we know as a live service game. Fortnite, Roblox, and Grand Theft Auto Online are all live service titans, and many rival publishers are hungry to feed players’ monster appetites for more.
The only problem is that wanting to make a fun live service game isn’t as easy as it looks; you need a massive amount of people to want to play it, and to somehow keep them interested over the course of years. Some companies have actually waffled on the decision to make a game live service. Electronic Arts had originally planned for Dragon Age: The Veilguard to be a live service game, and then it wasn’t, and then EA’s CEO argued that Veilguard would have done better had it been live service, and then many of the staff behind it were laid off.
Amid all that, Hazelight Studios director Josef Fares has denounced live service and micro-transactions, believing them harmful to creativity. It’s a gutsy statement, considering EA owns Hazelight, but Fares’ views are clear.
Hazelight’s latest co-op game, Split Fiction, has garnered significant acclaim, including a perfect score from Inverse.
“Look, if you want to do this for just for the money, fine, go do it. But it’s just that. The sad part is that it’s not pushing the creativity of video games forward. And that’s what I don’t like,” Fares tells Inverse. “Because at the end of the day, even if it’s just visual stuff, when they say it doesn’t affect the gameplay, there’s still decisions to be made that you have to pay money to continue playing, or to play like this, that really bothers me, because then your creative approach of a game is going to be affected. And I don’t like that.”
“And even if we live in a capitalist society, and money, blah, blah, blah, there is a world where money and creativity can meet,” he continued. “A good example is Nintendo actually, they’re on the market and they have a lot of shareholders, but they’re still making sure that they’re making great games full of passion.”
“And don’t even get me started on the games that do all the kinds of bull***t [that] mobile games [do], that is f***ed up. I don’t know. I don’t even want to comment on this.”
When I ask if he’s referring to gacha games with microtransactions, he adds, “No comments! I mean, I don’t like it for sure, right.”
It’s not the first time Fares has spoken out about staying true to his artistic ideas rather than being swept up by corporate interests. He’s said before that there was interest in making a sequel to A Way Out after the game sold several million copies, but he didn’t want to make A Way Out 2, so he moved on to 2021’s It Takes Two. For more on his process, and on life surrounding these popular couch co-op games that buck the live service trend, Inverse will be publishing a Game Changers feature on Fares soon.
