Given enough time everything changes, sometimes for the better and sometimes not. The developer Treasure is gone forever while Cave only exists to see its existing library updated for modern consoles, but Vampire Survivors came out of nowhere last year while the automation genre has been slowly growing since Factorio lit its fires a few years back. Farming games used to be a weird little niche with a total of one series keeping it alive, survival games didn’t exist at all, and if you couldn’t get printed on CD or DVD then sales wouldn’t be worth the development costs. Everything moves forward a bit at a time, and while not all changes are for the best, the goal is to keep on trying. Focus Entertainment used to be Focus Home Interactive, and as a publisher you never quite knew what you were going to get from them. That’s still true to an extent, but I recently had the chance to sit down with Focus' Chief Creative Officer Dessil Basmadjian for a presentation about the company’s evolution.
Focus, whether as -Home Interactive or -Entertainment, has been around since the early 2000s. As a publisher its best-known game in the early days would have been Trackmania, but it published Cycling Manager from 2001 up through 2018 so there’s clearly an audience there for its less core-player titles. Still, recent years have seen Focus packing a little more punch, with everything from a series of Warhammer games to Mudrunner/Snowrunner, not to mention the excellent Hardspace: Shipbreaker. Topping it off was last year’s A Plague Tale: Requiem, which was nominated for five separate categories in The Game Awards. While it may not have won any of them, that’s still an impressive feat for a title from any publisher, much less one that may have been best known in previous years for its mid-tier scattershot approach. The landscape has changed at Focus Entertainment, but it’s still looking to retain its offbeat sensibilities as the company grows and aims for a higher profile.
The big game in Focus' publishing future is of course Atomic Heart, a story-driven single-player FPS that oozes style in every aspect of its world design. An alternate-history Russian soldier is living the good life in a Soviet paradise when the AI suddenly turns hostile, and he’ll need to battle it out through a variety of compounds and complexes, some combat-oriented and others more puzzle-y, all connected by a decent-sized open overworld crawling with interconnected defenses. The full gameturned out amazing, living up to itsimpressive preview, and has been tearing up the charts in its short times since release. Atomic Heart is going head-to-head with the best of AAA gaming, which is an impressive feat for both the first-time developer and its publisher.
Most of the rest of the games weren’t ready to be talked about yet, beyond what you’re able to see on the Upcoming Releases tab ofFocus Entertainment’s Steam page. Focus' output is divided between two types of gaming: the bigger-budget hopefully-blockbusters like Atlas Fallen or Dontnod’s Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden, and more indie-type fare such as the lovely watercolor-painted Dordogne or the stylish language-puzzler Chants of Sennaar, the latter of which hasa playable demo available. Other titles like Hotel Renovator seem to be a call-back to Focus' past, but even that one has a twist in the form of an unexpected narrative waiting for an intrepid building designer to discover. And of course there’s more Warhammer on the way as well, in the form of the more traditional third-person action-shooter Space Marine 2 as well as a throwback FPS Boltgun. Finally, topping it off is the sole movie license in the group, the squad-strategy action game Aliens: Dark Descent. There’s a lot more on the way beyond this handful, of course, but these are the ones that are far enough along to talk about.
While the game overview was nice (and the more detailed gameplay information of the various titles off the record), some of the most interesting bits were from when Dessil Basmadjian compared Focus Entertainment as it had been to the publisher it’s trying to become. The evolution has been slow but steady, and a glance atFocus' releasesshows its consistent improvements over the years. In Mr. Basmadjian’s own words:
“It has changed quite a lot I want to say in the recent years. First of all we’ve worked on our image, changing the name, still trying to understand a little bit more what is our purpose. Trying to move away from just being identified by our budget ranges, which is I think not very exciting for anyone.
First of all and most important, dispositioning as an alternative to what the traditional mainstream offers. Gamers all around the world have acquired a certain education and taste for gaming, and like myself, I don’t watch Marvel movies any more because I feel like they’re all the same. I’m looking for some stuff that’s different, in terms of universes, in terms of gameplay propositions. I would say that’s what we’re trying to do as well for gamers that want something different from the traditional mainstream offerings, and also to have the independent creative freedom.
We’ve been doing publishing for like 20 years, the learning curve has been huge. Now I think we’ve acquired a good understanding of the elements that you need to be aware of when creating a game, and we attempt to be the best possible partner for the studios.”
As company goals go being big but different is a good one, and at the very least promises to be interesting to watch unfold. It’s still a business of course, and we chatted about things like all the mergers that have been happening recently (no plans to sell themselves to the highest bidder seeing as things are fine as they are) and NFTs (obvious train-wreck was obvious), but the bulk of the presentation wasn’t just the games, but how they worked together to build a portfolio of titles in Focus Entertainment’s efforts to evolve itself into a world-class publisher. The changes to Focus' approach to publishing have been slowly building year over year, and now the publisher is ready to try its hand at something bigger, but there is one thing it wants to keep as-is: “We still want to keep this like… guerilla vibe… I don’t want to say punk, but punk spirit.”
