STAINLESS STEEL

From one Extremes to another: how Warframe went from six-month 'Hail Mary' to a decade-plus of success

- LUKE KEMP

As we've seen all too clearly of late, making a successful service game one that can stick around for years, becoming part of the fabric of its players' lives in the process is anything but easy. There have been many attempts, some of them with the backing of the very largest, wealthiest publishers and platform holders. A few have succeeded, but many, many more have failed.

And then there's Warframe. More than a decade on from its 2013 launch, Digital Extremes' free-toplay shooter still reliably hovers around Steam's top 20 most-played chart, having attracted 80 million players over the years, and continues to launch on new formats an Android release is set for this year.

If any service-game success is unlikely, then Warframe's is practically a miracle, given its origins.

This was the last chance for a small studio, made as quickly as possible and self-published because its maker had no other option. A game that wouldn't even exist if it weren't for failure.

"We had a project with a publisher," CEO Steve Sinclair tells us. "And that publisher ran into financial difficulties and cancelled it." Working at the behest of a larger paymaster had long been the bread-and-butter of Ontario-based Digital Extremes. The studio started out making pinball games with Epic, a partnership that continued into co-developing the Unreal games. After that series' end it took on a string of other work-for-hire projects, from BioShock 2's multiplayer mode to The Darkness II, developing the sequel to a game made by another studio entirely.