Rebellion CEO puts the studio’s recent avoidance of layoffs down to control of scope and cost: ‘Sometimes we say, guys, this game’s too big’

PC Gamer’s Joshua Wolens recently spoke to Rebellion CEO Jason Kingsley about the studio’s extremely British survival FPS Atomfall, which is a kind of Fallout: It’s Grim Up North Edition. (Or possibly Stalker: Shadow of Cumbria.) During that conversation, Josh asked how the studio had managed to avoid the layoffageddon that’s hit the rest of the games industry following the Covid boom.

“It would be incredibly egotistical to just say it was entirely due to our incredible skill at running a company,” Kingsley replied. “I think there’s always a little bit of luck involved. I think we control our budgets quite carefully. We have substantial budgets, in terms of millions and millions of pounds, but we don’t have hundreds of millions of pounds. We try to make it that we can make a really good game, and it has a very decent chance of making a profit. And that’s really what it comes down to.”

In the last five years, that’s meant games like Sniper Elite 5 and Sniper Elite Resistance, Evil Genius 2: World Domination, and Zombie Army 4: Dead War. Choosing to make smaller games rather than massive open worlds isn’t just a matter of budget, however. It’s also down to personal preference.

“I prefer a small, really good game than a really big kind of game that isn’t focused down on what’s important for the player,” Kingsley says. “We’re just very professional with controlling scope and costs. Sometimes we say, guys, this game’s too big.”

While in recent years that caution’s meant making games in established properties, Kingsley says the aim is for Rebellion’s games to be “roughly two-thirds sequels and brands, and roughly one-third slightly more experimental”, though it has to be careful about experiments “because we’ve got a responsibility to team members and staff. We don’t want to hire and fire people all the time. There’s so much job loss going on in the industry, it’s frightening at the moment. We haven’t had to go in that direction, and we don’t want to go in that direction, so we’ve got to keep a balance.”

The two-third/one-third split isn’t a hard and fast rule, then? “It’s not a hard and fast rule. We don’t really have many hard and fast rules. Actually we have more guidelines, to quote a famous movie pirate.”