Released in January 2015, and moving five million copies by August 2015, Dying Light has been a huge success so far, with developer Techland set to expand it with The Following DLC next month.
In its first 100 days, Dying Light saw 4.5 million players, and “it just kept growing from there,” Techland Development Director and COO Pawel Zawodny told Develop. “Thanks to this we’re now in a place where the future of our studio feels firmly in our hands alone.”
According to Zawodny, the reason Dying Light has been more successful than their previous games, such as Dead Island, is because of all the lessons they’ve learned:
I think it’s mainly because Dying Light is a collection of all the lessons we learnt from those previous games. Dying Light was our first proper chance to apply all our collective knowledge and efforts into one vision which we had full creative control over.
A lot of the ideas applied in Dying Light had been floating around with our designers for ages: total freedom of movement in first-person parkour, a dynamic day/night cycle that changes the way you play and a truly open world. Dying Light let us actually take the time to figure how to implement these ideas.
When asked about their reasoning to give away so much new content for free to players, Zawodny explained that it’s important for them to “treat our core fans fairly.”
He continued:
These are the players who supported us from the start and have helped put us in this amazing position where we can expand and add to our original vision. And in return we’re creating even stronger brand ambassadors for Dying Light who will help us bring more people into our game once the Enhanced Edition is out. It’s really a win-win.
While he wouldn’t speak for other developers about offering free content in their games, Zawodny said, “It’s a strategy we’ve applied that has worked amazingly for us and we plan to stick to it. We’re an independent studio that’s privately owned so the only people we have to make happy is our fans and ourselves and this strategy does exactly that.”
As for Dying Light’s modding tools, Zawodny said, “The dream would be that one day such tools are just as accessible to console users.”
[Source: Develop, VideoGamer]
