This week gave us the welcome news that the excellent Dead Cells has managed to sell 10 million copies, which is a remarkable achievement. A small proportion of that success could perhaps be attributed to the fact it recently got DLC which turned it into a Castlevania title – and recent comments from the team behind it have us suspecting that there might be more vampire hunting in the future of studio Evil Empire (which took over from original Dead Cells developer Motion Twin in 2019).
Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz, Evil Empire CEO Steve Filby has revealed that the company is working on two "massive video game franchises" from third-party IP holders.
We ended up signing with two third-party IP holders to make the next instalments in these really massive video game franchises
Filby explains that, during his time at Motion Twin (where he was employed as CEO and head of business development), there were many offers to work on external IP, but they were always turned down. "Motion Twin doesn't work like that," he says. "Because they're focused 100% on their original IP. And at some point we had these awesome offers coming at us. At the time, I was wearing my Motion Twin hat, I didn't think that we had the chops for me to put on my Evil Empire hat and say 'hi, I know some guys!'"
Once Evil Empire took full control of Dead Cells, though, Filby reveals that the door was open. "Eventually people actually started asking me directly, saying 'Well, look, you guys are doing all this work on Dead Cells now, you have taken over things and what you're doing is fantastic, why don't you make the next game in X awesome series that you've been playing since you're a child'? And so from there, we ended up signing with two third-party IP holders to make the next instalments in these really massive video game franchises."
It has been confirmed that the first of these titles will come out in Steam Early Access next year, but the other won't see release until 2025. Both will be totally new takes on existing IP, rather than remasters.
The IPs that we're working on have been dormant for quite some time but you can't offer what was previously offered. You have to make a game for today's audiences
"We're not going to make a copy-and-paste of a previous thing," says Filby. "We really are talking about rebooting or reinventing. The IPs that we're working on have been dormant for quite some time but you can't offer what was previously offered. You have to make a game for today's audiences. You can't expect your crappy jokes from the '90s to work with today's audience. It's also important that it's co-creation. We're not a work-for-hire studio. Even if you were to come to us with a brief and say, 'Here's $6.5 million and you have 372 days to make this game with exactly that amount of money to these exact specifications', that's not what we do. [The IP holders] gave us the creative freedom and the cash to make this thing and we'll go away and do something awesome with it, and come back and hopefully have a game that's gonna resonate with people today, while still bringing to the forefront the strong elements of the IP."
While we're clearly a long, long way away from conformation that Evil Empire is working on Castlevania, Filby's comments do indicate that this is a "awesome series" that he's been playing since his childhood but has been "dormant for quite some time" – and the team's amazing work with the Dead Cells DLC certainly won't have done them any harm in the eyes of Konami, which is believed to be preparing a new entry in the franchise. Could this be that entry, or will the publisher take a multi-pronged approach, as it has done with its recent revival of the Silent Hill series?
Let us know your thoughts and predictions below.