Vermintide 2’s rat-smashing romp through Warhammer’s End Times has already done cracking good business on the PC, selling more than a million copies in its first five weeks on the market. With Xbox One and PlayStation 4 releases slated for later this year, developers Fatshark say the expansion onto consoles is something PC players can look forward to.
For one thing, building the console versions has helped find ways to improve the PC version of Vermintide 2. Speaking to PCGamesN, producer Robert Bäckström said making the game work on the consoles’ older hardware has pushed them to make optimisations to the game that otherwise may have been considered optional.
“You might overlook those optimisations, because they’re not mandatory, but it will make the game run better for those who do not have the latest rigs, so that’s a good thing,” Bäckström said.
But another major benefit to launching on consoles has to do with scale. While Vermintide 2’s success has made it a financially viable game, Fatshark is still a pretty small fish compared to the likes of Microsoft and Sony – certainly in terms of their marketing budget.
“Just more attention to the game will be good,” lead designer Victor Magnuson told us. “Even though we’ve been really successful this time, there’s still a lot of people who haven’t even heard of our game, so the more people we can reach the better. An Xbox version and PlayStation version will help us in that regard, even on PC.”
There’s always the question of whether devoting resources to multiple versions, particularly in a relatively small team, will mean less attention for any particular platform, and Magnuson acknowledged that can be an issue. However, he said it’s not necessarily a one to one tradeoff, and taking the Xbox version out of the picture, for example, wouldn’t necessarily translate into an equal amount of resources being freed up for the PC version. Further, console versions mean more potential revenues for the company, which can then devote more resources to the game across the board.
“All the money that comes in goes into the company, and the company develops the game,” he said. “So I think it’s a win-win situation for platforms.”
Check out our full interview with Fatshark for even more on Vermintide 2 and why co-op gaming is going through a renaissance.