The CEO of Monument Valley developer Ustwo Games, Maria Sayans, has outlined the studio needs to lower development costs, and to do so it will rely on contractors in the future rather than hiring full-time staff. Sayans explained the plan in an interview with Game Developer at London Games Fest.
In the wake of Netflix dropping the Monument Valley games from its service and deals with major companies drying up, Ustwo has a plan to focus on building “meaningful single player experiences” for PC and consoles. It’s a plan already in motion, with Ustwo recently porting several of its games to platforms like Steam and Switch without publisher support.
However, Sayans explained that they’ve subsequently learned that lower development budgets are going to be crucial.
“We saw a lot of potential for the Monument Valley IP to be maybe reset and reinvented for PC and consoles, but what became clear was that our development budgets were too high for us to achieve a safer break even if we were aiming for PC and console,” she said, explaining that the studio has been making games over three- to four-year production cycles for between £7 million to £10 million, and that they have to lower that cost – especially if and when working on new projects outside the established Monument Valley series.
“For example, if we did something like Alba or Assemble With Care, we would have to do that for a lot less money,” said Sayans. “There are people doing really, really well in those spaces on PC for much smaller budgets, that we will never be able to achieve because we’re based in London and have employees with pensions and so on.
“We’ve been a little bit too romantic about the idea that we should have employees and give people long-term job security. I think that got us into a place where, reaching the heights of Monument Valley 3 [production], contractors were always a relatively low percentage of our employee base.”
Sayans said Ustwo will be changing this balance in the future.
“I think going forward, we’ll see that we’ve got a core team and any growth will come through contractors, which is something I hate about the industry. I’ve been in the industry for 20 years, and those of us who joined in the early 2000s, we had it very good. You want to be able to give that kind of stability… but I think that’s a shift in how we want to work with people going forward.”
Luke is a Senior Editor on the IGN reviews team. You can track him down on Bluesky @mrlukereilly to ask him things about stuff.
