Studios can 'suffer' on the stock market: Hitman dev IO Interactive says independence brought stability

Hitman developer IO Interactive (IOI) has become that most elusive of things: a success story in an industry rocked by layoffs, funding cuts, and studio closures.

Over the past three years, the Danish company has opened new studios in Brighton and Istanbul, expanded its production slate with a new online fantasy RPG, and recruited senior talent to assist with its high-profile James Bond title codenamed Project 007.

It achieved all of that while supporting and growing Hitman: World of Assassination, which continues to attract players by the bucketload—as evidenced by the over 150,000 daily active users that logged in recently to take out Conor McGregor when the MMA star was introduced as an Elusive Target.

How has the studio delivered stability and growth when other companies across the industry are floundering? According to chief development officer Veronique Lallier, the answer is rooted in the company's decision to ditch shareholders and go independent back in 2017.

Speaking to Game Developer earlier this month, Lallier said it was "heartbreaking" to see how many studios and developers have been impacted by closures and layoffs, and explained IOI has "aways been very conscious and very careful" about how it grows to avoid similar situations.

For Lallier, expanding requires finding the right talent for the right projects, ensuring you can unleash the passion of your employees so they can fulfill their potential. "You need to focus on the game, and the type of game you're making—while making sure you aren't spreading yourself across too many project," she adds.

After working hard to improve and develop Hitman as a franchise, for instance, it made sense for IOI to expand with Project 007. Securing the rights to develop a James Bond title might seem like a no-brainer, but Lallier explains those big decisions have to make sense. She says leaping from Hitman to Project 007 felt natural because they're both essentially "secret agent" titles—which is a genre baked into the DNA of the studio.

Independence for IOI means developing projects without compromise

Multi-project studios like IOI require a lot of talent, and Lallier says that once you've welcomed people into the fold, it's vital you leverage them in the right way. "Making games is very hard. I'm not going to lie. So, I think the recipe of success is to be focused on your passion," she explains. On a practical level, that means allowing the teams within IOI to iterate rapidly and without fear. Playing every day. Testing every day. Sharing ideas with colleagues across disciplines and locations. Challenging each other to "find the fun." It's a highly collaborative approach that works because IOI put the foundations in place.

For example, although IOI has studios in multiple locations, Lallier says they're all in timezones that overlap. "You can based in Copenhagen, Malmo, Barcelona, Brighton, or Istanbul and working across the same project," she says. "That's how we are divided, but if you look at the geography, we make sure we're all in the same ballpark of timezones. So we don't have people on the West Coast of America and we don't have people in Japan."

She adds that managing your finances as an independent studio is also "critical," and says "lean" spending during the earliest phases of development can help provide a runway for success. Lallier feels those decisions, which might sound mundane on paper, have ultimately given IOI the edge. Notably, she suggests the company was only able to put that plan in place because it's not beholden to the whims of shareholders or a parent company.

"I think studios can suffer when they're on the stock market and so on—when there are big changes happening. All of a sudden you can lose millions and billions, but we don't have this problem," she says.

"We have different challenges as an independent studio, because you might not have the power of a big publisher, but I think the advantage is that the constraints we have are the constraints we can control to some extent. Then we can forecast—we can see how much money we have. How much time we have based on that burn rate. Then we can find ways to still create the thing that makes sense without compromising so much because you have less external influences that you need to handle."

Correction (08/01/24): This article was updated to reflect that Hitman's latest Elusive Target mission featuring Conor McGregor attracted 150,000 DAU at launch.