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Thief designer says that the immersive sim audience is too small for AAA games: 'There's quite a few of us who think the way to do it is be III or AA'
Immersive sims should get out of the AAA arms race.
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Randy Smith Evergreen knows his immersive sims. As a designer on Thief: The Dark Project, he was there in the early days of the genre, and his credits include System Shock 2 and Dark Messiah: Might and Magic, as well as Thief 2 and Thief: Deadly Shadows. And he's pretty sure the genre is a bad fit for the AAA arms race.
"Myself and other folks who have worked extensively on immersive sims have a belief that the immersive sims that are being created today and are slated for the future are, by and large, thinking of themselves as [existing] in an arms race to be bigger and better," he tells us.
And this has been happening for a while. Just think about how Deus Ex: Mankind Divided pushed things in terms of fidelity. Or how big and expensive Arkane's modern offerings have been. They aren't competing with other immersive sims, they're competing with blockbuster shooters and vast open-world games from the biggest studios out there.
"Like, you just have to put more money into them, make a bigger and bigger immersive sim. It's got to be AAA, and it's got to sit right alongside Ghost of Tsushima and GTA 6, and it's got to be a game that's big enough to capture the public's attention. But I think that might be a misread for the audience size of immersive sims."
It certainly hasn't worked out for Arkane. Dishonored 2 and Prey are landmark immersive sims, but they were backed by a big publisher, Bethesda, who has since been swallowed up by Microsoft. Both games were considered commercial disappointments because Bethesda's expectations were not realistic for what has always been a niche genre.
Arkane Austin was shut down by Microsoft in 2024, following the poor reception to co-op vampire shooter Redfall. Arkane Lyon, meanwhile, is still hanging on, but only because of French labour laws. Microsoft reportedly wants rid of it. If a studio of this pedigree, with this amount of talent and experience, can't fit the square peg into the round hole, what chance does anyone else have?
Smith Evergreen believes the solution is to not participate in the arms race, unless you make something aimed at the mass market rather than the comparatively tiny immersive sim audience. He uses the Arkham games as an example.
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