Broadly speaking, it’s fine for something to exist as a niche. Whatever form of media a thing might be, to fulfil a niche is to meet the expectations of at least a handful of people with a particular taste that many others don’t, and I think that’s a delightful thing to do. In video games, immersive sims might not be the most niche genre in the world, but they’ve historically not done gangbusters sales wise, meaning that triple-A takes don’t quite make their money back. If you ask Randy Smith Evergreen, a designer on Thief: The Dark Project, perhaps avoiding the world of triple-A is the way to go for immersive sims.
Speaking to PC Gamer, Evergreen explains that both him and other developers who have done a lot of work on immersive sims “have a belief that the immersive sims that are being created today and are slated for the future are, by and large, thinking of themselves as [existing] in an arms race to be bigger and better.” He notes how these games are trying to compete against much bigger names, saying that imsims have “to be triple-A, and it’s got to sit right alongside Ghost of Tsushima and GTA 6, and it’s got to be a game that’s big enough to capture the public’s attention. But I think that might be a misread for the audience size of immersive sims.”
From Evergreen’s perspective, as well as other imsim designers, he says, it’s probably better to take the triple-I or double-A approach over chasing that triple-A money. “So you’re talking about a $3-10 million budget, a passionate team led by some of us folks who have experience with immersive sims or newcomers who just played a lot of immersive sims and really get it, making something that’s a little bit smaller, more passionate, and can be made more quickly,” he suggests.
The developer notes how the original Thief had a budget of $3 million, or roughly $6 million adjusted for inflation, and that he isn’t entirely sure that a game with that kind of budget “that you want to make in the year 2026 is going to sell disproportionately different amounts of copies than the $250 million one that comes out of a big studio. So I think that’s an example of where the market is going, or [where] I think it should go at least.”
I find myself agreeing with Evergreen, in part because of how the film industry used to be. These days it’s all blockbusters that half the time don’t make their multi-hundred dollar budgets back, when there was once a time where you’d get mid-budget films that served a particular niche and existed for the sake of having a broader portfolio (and would sometimes find success in DVD sales if they didn’t in the box office, though that’s harder to replicate in the games industry). There’s a value in having niche, mid-budget games that appeal to a specific market that won’t force a studio to close just because they weren’t a number one bestseller. But what do I know! Surely the latest online gunslop will be a hit, just like the others.
