'Quantum Break' Is Financially Risky Because It's a AAA Game You Can Finish

It opens when it's hero, Jack Joyce, visits an old friend at a university to see his latest time-bending experiment. The way his clothes sway when he walks, the small details of his facial expressions (a smirk, a raised eyebrow), the soft glow of street lighting at night—every frame bombards my eyes with more details my brain can process, but the overall effect is that this is a very convincing place. The American Northeast city of Riverport where the game takes place doesn't exist, but it feels real.

Of course, all this detail is in service of what most games of this caliber are about: shooting stuff. Predictably, Joyce's time-traveling experiment goes horribly wrong, creating a rift in time that could end the world, and giving Joyce superpowers like the ability to create spheres where time doesn't move, or dash forward through time and space. Monarch, an evil corporation with an evil-sounding name, wants to pin the disastrous experiment on Joyce. When its goons come after Joyce, I used these abilities to kick their ass spectacularly.

I stopped bullets inches from my face like Neo in The Matrix. I shot thugs in the head while they floated through the air in slow motion. Gunfire made sparks fly, glass shatter, and flammable materials explode. It's sensory overload by design, and I love it.

Quantum Break developer Remedy became known for this kind of spectacle back in 2001 with its first big hit Max Payne. The two games are very similar. They're both story-driven action games with cool slow motion effects. They both use cutting edge tech and look amazing. They're as big, beautiful, and expensive as big budget games get.

But a lot has changed since 2001, and even 2010, when Remedy released Alan Wake on the Xbox 360. What used to be the norm for the highest tier of game production today feels like an oddity and a huge gamble on Microsoft's part, which has exclusive rights to and will publish Quantum Break on April 5. It's a game that's supposed to make you want to get an Xbox One instead of a PlayStation 4.

The problem for Remedy, and what makes Quantum Break a gamble for Microsoft, is that a big, beautiful action game with a beginning, middle, and end simply isn't enough anymore. Consider the biggest games on the market today: Grand Theft Auto, Far Cry, Destiny, League of Legends, and so on. They're either gigantic sandboxes where players can spend hundreds of hours exploring; online multiplayer games that players are encouraged to log into frequently; free-to-play games where players can buy in-game items; or some combination of all of the above.

AAA games in 2016 aren't like movies or TV shows in that you experience them, then move on to the next thing. They're designed to keep players around for years, maybe forever, and to continue asking for money, one way or another, for as long as possible. They can do this with extra pieces of content you can buy after release or cosmetic items for your characters. The point is that, if a game company is going to invest millions of dollars in a game, it's going to want more chances to collect on its investment than just that initial entry price, which is usually $60.

The type of games Remedy makes are almost opposite to this trend.

Sam Lake, the creative director at Remedy and the literal face of Max Payne, told me that what makes a Remedy game a Remedy is an evolving concept, but that it does have defining characteristics. The first of these is that Remedy is inspired by other media—film, TV, graphic novels—more than it's inspired by other games. Max Payne, for example, had the style of Film Noir, delivered big story beats with comic book panels, and the action choreography of a John Woo movie. Remedy's Alan Wake, on the other hand,was broken up into TV-like episodes, and borrowed heavily from Stephen King's horror novels.

Quantum Break pushes this idea to an extreme by doing something no game has done before: It includes a full on, live-action TV show. You'll play a chapter of Quantum Break, then watch how your action impacted the world and story in a 20+ minute episode. Actors like Aidan Gillen, Shawn Ashmore, Lance Reddick, and Dominic Monaghan, lend their likeness to the game, and reprise the same roles in the TV show, which has the production value of a mid-tier Syfy original series.

I mean that as a compliment. I've never seen a game company put on a production like this, and for the sole reason of integrating it with the story of a game. So not only is Quantum Break expensive for all the reasons AAA games are expensive, and not only did Remedy create a new game engine and tools to make it (whereas even many AAA games these days use an off the shelf solution like Unreal Engine), it also has to bear all the costs associated with creating a TV show.

It's conceptually daring, it looks amazing, and I had a lot of fun in the two hours I got to play it, but none of that changes the reality of the market. It's a single-player, story driven game. Players can buy it, finish it, and return it to GameStop to get some of their money back. At that point, other players can buy used copies, which are sales Microsoft won't see a profit from. This is why publishers don't make games like this anymore. They don't have what game reviewers and publishers alike call "replay value."

"There are problems with that model that we are seeing in the industry, but at the same time, I think you can do beautiful things with that," Lake said. "The very basic problem is rental and resale. If you can play through it in a weekend, that is a problem. We are looking at this critically and thinking about what we should we keep, because we are good at making certain kinds of experiences and we don't want to lose that."

Remedy's solution for this problem isn't very convincing. Lake said that players will hold on to Quantum Break because it has an interactive narrative. At key moments, players can choose how the story will unfold, so there's reason to replay the game, make different decisions, and see the different consequences. Players can also choose how to upgrade their time-shifting superpowers, so playing the game again and choosing different upgrades can potentially also change the way you play. Finally, there's also the fact that Quantum Break is really fun, and is doing something completely new and insane with its built-in TV show, but it all still seems really risky.

It's a lot more than what Max Payne had, but Quantum Break still isn't a game that demands dozens of hours like Far Cry, or is a lifestyle choice like Destiny. It just looks like a very good game.

Next time Remedy sets out on a project like this, Lake said, it will consider all of the solutions that other games use these days. He doesn't want Remedy to ever give up on the types of games that came to define it, but he's realistic about the current state of the market.

"In some ways it's a shame," he said. "I myself enjoy these kinds of experiences, but then again, you need to have this make business sense as well."