Splash Damage planned on self-publishing Extraction, its free-to-play shooter, before Nexon America signed on as its publisher.
Speaking with Polygon, the firm’s CEO Paul Wedgwood said back in 2010, the game began life as a free, spiritual successor to Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory and was self-funded. Titled Dirty Bomb before changing the name to Extraction, Wedgwood said the studio was under the impression it would be the only company that wanted to publish it.
“We were going to operate it ourselves. That was the plan,” he said. “We would have just grown it organically. If you look at independent developers who try to do it, they have good games, but these games only find little markets, which is a shame. I don’t think [Extraction] wouldn’t have had the potential to grow exponentially, but it would have taken a lot longer to do everything.”
However, the studio knew it could lose money if the game didn’t make enough to cover the cost of servers and continued development support, so they Splash Damage parntered with Nexon due to it having the ability to support the game, and the willingness to allow the developer to continue development a apace it’s comfortable with.
“Nexon already has the huge infrastructure, so we can use their servers, their hosting and their football field of awesome technology,” he said. “They’re the world’s biggest free-to-play publisher — it’s like being a company that wants to do something in the app space and partnering with Google. In the game space, that’s partnering with Nexon.”
Monetization options are still being discussed but both companies want to create a “high-integrity product that’s really authentic.”
A date has not been set but Nexon will bring Extraction to PC in Australia, Europe, New Zealand and North America.
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