were just never given the chance. So we started looking around. Airship was the first one we came across where we both wanted exactly the same thing. We both had incredible ambition.” Wayfinder isn’t the first time the
company has tried its hand at external publishing, but it does show a change in what it wants to create with its partnerships with developers from outside the company. “Digital Extremes as a company had
played with trying to do this previously and done a couple of smaller projects that didn’t really work out,” says Browne. “When I came on board, I told James that we should try and be a little more ambitious and if we’re going to do projects, they should try and be games that could sit alongside Warframe. We upped our ambition level a little bit and started looking at developers who we felt could create the same level of AAA quality that we do.”
DIGITAL SYNDICATE The Warframe developer-publisher has been focused on its sci-fi ninja space opera for so long that you could reasonably expect that realigning to deliver a second online game as a publisher might have proven to be a difficult task. That’s not the case, though. It’s more a matter of partnership logistics and planning, rather than diverting resources. “We have a development team split pretty much
across the world like everybody these days,” says Browne. “But the main team at Airship Syndicate is around 70. Then we have outsourcing groups and my team in Digital Extremes who help out on
the design and the art and the technology side of things. If you include all the outsourcing groups, it’s probably more than 100.” The fact of the matter is that a lot of the
Warframe team at Digital Extremes won’t touch the work on Wayfinder at all. “It’s a very separate effort. There’s the Warframe
team, and there’s our external projects team. Where it crosses over is in stuff that we can help with, or provide experience and knowledge to the developer on. So primarily we’re a publisher, and we’ve been doing that for 10 years. “In some respects, we’ve done it longer than
most. We were one of the first to get to the free-to- play realm in the west. We’ve run that business, so we bring a lot of stuff to the table that developers just don’t have. When we went to talk to Airship, the game they were pitching was not a free-to- play online games-as-a-service project. It was an extension of the games they’d done previously. We bring a lot of experience to the table in the digital publishing realm, and also in the free-to-play area, so things changed a bit.” Despite the games being
separate enterprises, the time spent on Warframe comes with experience, and development lessons learned. Digital Extremes intends to leverage that, so that Wayfinder can have a smoother launch than its forerunner, particularly in regards to its post-release content plan. “We learned a lot in the early
days of Warframe about how to scale a game like that, and
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