After buying its independence from Square Enix in 2017, Hitman developer IO Interactive has managed to not just survive but thrive in an increasingly hostile industry where it seems we can’t go a week without hearing about new layoffs and studio closures. In an interview with The Game Business, CEO Hakan Abrak explained that IO’s survival in the triple-A space is in no small part thanks to fighting against ever-increasing budgets by having fewer toilets.
Abrak explained this in his interview, saying that after the release of 2012’s Hitman: Absolution, which he worked on as executive producer, IO realised it had to break its habit of wasting investment in development resources. If only more executives could see this.
CEO Hakan Abrak Interview
“I swore never to do more new toilets,” Abrak said. “‘Just do new toilets,’ right? Like, we were just doing new everything. And it was just a throwaway.”
Back in 2016, Abrak said it chose to orient its development focus around “smart, accumulated content,” creating what they now call “the brick system.” With it, IO started producing assets and systems that could be repurposed later on for later games.
This new model has allowed IO Interactive to decrease the development budget of their subsequent games, as most of the work is already done. This has allowed the Hitman team to put more of their focus on other aspects of the game, which has had a pretty large impact on the game’s reviews. He then went on to say this:
“Without being too precise: Hitman ’16, let’s say that if that was $100 million, Hitman 2 was maybe $60 million. Hitman 3 was $20 million,” Abrak said, noting that the third game still released with new, unique locations. “And Hitman 3 was the highest Metacritic. It was 85, 84, and 87 Metacritic.”
He then goes on to say how this pursuit of efficiency and the longevity of their games helped them avoid falling into the same issue as many other triple-A developers that ended up overextending themselves during what he called the “gold rush” of COVID-era expansions and acquisitions, which is partly why we are still experiencing the layoffs and studio closures.
“We could have grown a lot more,” Abrak said. “We could have taken on more projects. But I think we’ve been very mindful about growing with the pace of where our culture and our expertise could follow.”
