Alan Wake developer Remedy says its because they have signed-up for an exclusive deal with Microsoft, though they now admit was a “business risk," but also reduce the technological headache, that is the PS3.

The highly ambitious project took almost five years to complete and was originally planned for the PS3, Xbox 360 and PC, but Remedy decided to partner with Microsoft to publish the game exclusively for Xbox 360 and PC. The reason?

"Our strategy was one of focus," explains Remedy CTO Markus Maki. "That's actually a really core Remedy element, well if you forget the ambitious goals we had. We needed to be top notch in some areas, but we knew we couldn't do everything better than some developers out there. For example, this meant there was no multiplayer. That wasn't in our core set of skills and it would have been a huge effort.

"We also took the approach to license middleware that made sense, even when we didn't end up using it all for one reason or another. And then, the big deal - to go with Microsoft and take one big technological effort, the PS3, out of the equation. That then changed the technology risk to a business risk - but that's a subject for a different talk altogether..."

Maki also said that Remedy created the Alan Wake engine from scratch with only eight programmers, despite the fact that they could also have also used Epic's Unreal Engine.

“We looked at Unreal and other technologies out there, but this was actually before the PS3 and Xbox 360 were ever even released,” he said. “We also had all three platforms planned in the beginning – PC, 360 and PS3. I think it’s safe to say now overly optimistic view of the schedule. At that point, we didn’t dare commit to shipping a game on third-party tech until the developers of that tech had shipped a game on each of those platforms. Five years later, [I'll admit] that the reasoning wasn’t solid because these guys beat us to the punch easily.”

Bu still, Maki reasserted that they are satisfied with their engine, and the lighting effects and open world environments it could produce - and said that they have learned many valuable lessons from its creation.


Via [CVG]

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