Remedy is in control

The Verge

6 hours ago

In the quiet suburb of Espoo, a short drive west from Helsinki in Finland, is an unassuming building that's home to one of the most confounding studios in games. Remedy Entertainment is known for getting weird. It started with the meta horror of Alan Wake, and has since expanded with Control, a game that turns a bureaucratic government office into a sinister and unsettling battleground. Their worlds merge the surreal and the mundane — which is not a bad description of Remedy itself.
On the day I visited, the studio's energy was relaxed and subdued — in true Finnish style, there are even multiple onsite saunas — and frankly a little boring, especially for a creative team known for the likes of the mind-bending Ashtray Maze or 'Old Gods of Asgard' musical. But that contrast is also one of the keys to Remedy's recent success.
In the wake of the covid-19 pandemic, the video game industry has experienced studio closures, persistent layoffs, corporate meddling, and ill-fated games that were canceled soon after launch. Exceptions like Remedy have been rare. Over the past decade, the studio has been implementing a plan to help it compete with bigger, better-funded developers and publishers, steadily inching its way from a work-for-hire studio to one in charge of its own destiny. As the industry has shifted toward live-service hits like Fortnite and blockbusters like Grand Theft Auto, Remedy has taken big swings with ambitious and delightfully strange narrative titles.
Now it's trying to expand even further with its first multiplayer — and self-published — game in FBC: Firebreak. The stakes are high: it's the perfect example of Remedy's new way of working and a proof of concept for its larger, more expansive future. It's also a strange experience, marrying the surreal tone of Control with co-op play that bucks the latest online gaming trends. But to hear it from the Finnish developer, it only gets to take swings like Firebreak because it nailed all of the boring stuff first.
'We are this building,' explains creative director Mikael Kasurinen. 'This is it; this is us. We aren't owned by anybody else, and I think that realization brings that culture of taking more responsibility. There is nothing above us that will save the day if things go wrong. It's all on us.'
This wasn't the case for much of the studio's existence. Founded in 1995, Remedy's first release was a combat racing game called Death Rally. A few years later, the studio garnered widespread acclaim with 2001's Max Payne, a hard-boiled noir with action ripped out of a John Woo movie. After a sequel, Remedy expanded in new directions with the survival horror game Alan Wake and sci-fi game / TV show hybrid Quantum Break.
Despite its modest success, though, the studio found itself stuck in a cycle of working from game to game. It didn't own any of its creations — instead, they were the property of publishers like Rockstar and Microsoft — and, with the exception of the rapid 18-month development of Max Payne 2, Remedy was only putting out new games every five years or so. That half-decade cycle meant that if any game failed, so did the company.
This put Remedy in a precarious position, and it's something Tero Virtala realized right away when he took over as CEO in 2016. 'At that point Remedy had been around for 20 years, and succeeded in relation to many criteria,' Virtala says. That included releasing several hit games and steadily growing in headcount. But Virtala says that 'it didn't feel like enough' to have such a talented team and only release one game every four or five years. While it's typical for games to take years to build, only having one project at a time left the studio vulnerable in case any of them flopped.
Virtala helped spearhead a new path for Remedy's future built on two pillars: One was becoming a multi-project studio, so that it was less dependent on any single game. Second, Remedy also wanted ownership of its original creations and to eventually become its own publisher.
'It's important to understand enough of the business, even though I don't love it.'
A major part of making this work was ensuring that everyone in the studio bought in and understood the plan, not just management. It sounds like a controversial idea and runs counter to the way the industry typically works: whereas most studios operate with clear lines dividing creative and business, Virtala believed that empowering developers to understand the business side meant they'd be better able to make the right decisions on the creative end.
'People are smart,' Virtala says of his employees, 'and they are mature enough to understand that if you want to make creative, ambitious games, it's not possible unless you have the financial basis, unless you are aligned with the technology, unless you have the people and the production plans are in order. We try to provide the teams with as much information as possible. And then the teams are in the best place to try to figure out what is the best creative path within these constraints.'
And it seems that the creative side has bought in. Sam Lake has been with Remedy for nearly its entire 30-year existence, starting out as a writer on Death Rally. (He's also the face of the original Max Payne — literally.) He now serves as creative director and is the lead writer behind all of Remedy's major franchises. 'It's important to understand enough of the business, even though I don't love it,' Lake says. 'When you're creating a game concept, there are a lot of decisions being made, and the more you understand about what these decisions affect, the better you are prepared to choose wisely.'
The real turning point came with the launch of Control in 2019, the first game released under Virtala's leadership. While the idea for the story and world had been kicking around in Lake's head for some time, the actual development happened as Virtala was implementing broader studio changes. He pushed for more efficient processes and timelines, hoping to make games faster without sacrificing the quality level Remedy had become known for.
'Those three years were transformative for Remedy,' Kasurinen says. He notes that this new development style meant planning much more in advance on Control, and viewing limitations around budgets and timelines as creative challenges 'that forced us to reinvent many things in a good way.' When it came out, Control exemplified exactly what the studio wanted to be: it was developed in a comparatively brisk three years, was a brand-new property that the studio would (eventually) own outright, and was in development alongside another project in collaboration with Korean publisher Smilegate. Creatively, it also allowed the team to attempt a new kind of open-ended action game and it opened up new directions for the future.
Control's success allowed this plan to continue. Since then, Remedy has steadily expanded. Control was followed by a long-awaited sequel to Alan Wake, and the studio has grown to 380 people. It currently has four projects in development: a sequel to Control, remakes of the Max Payne games, an unannounced title, and its first multiplayer game, the recently launched Control spinoff FBC: Firebreak. With the exception of Max Payne, which is being published by Rockstar, all of its in-development games are self-published.
Remedy now also holds the publishing rights for Alan Wake (the sequel was originally published by Epic Games), and has created its own connected universe, which unites the worlds of Alan Wake and Control. In 2024 it partnered with Annapurna Pictures to potentially expand this even further through film and TV adaptations. Branching out into new genres and mediums is a further attempt to grow Remedy's capabilities — and to better insulate itself from the volatile whims of the games industry.
Getting to this moment required some structural changes. Remedy now has multiple development teams, with staff shifting between them as needed, and it also has a unique setup with two creative directors in Lake and Kasurinen. Lake says that both of them want to be hands-on when they're leading a new game, and so having two people in the role allows the creative side to always be involved in larger studio decisions, even in the midst of an intense development process.
'When I was deep into Alan Wake 2, I wasn't a part of attending weekly management meetings,' Lake says. 'I just needed to focus on [the game]. But it's really important that we have the creative side represented on the company level. So this arrangement gives us flexibility. We can represent each other.'
Even still, the transition wasn't always smooth. As Remedy attempted to grow into a multi-project studio, not all of its expansion attempts worked out. First, the studio partnered with Smilegate on a new iteration of the popular military shooter Crossfire. The idea was that Smilegate would make the multiplayer portion of the game, while Remedy would craft a single-player story mode, giving the studio a chance to make its first first-person shooter. But CrossfireX was poorly received upon release in 2022 — campaign mode included — and shut down a year later.
Remedy also attempted to get into the world of free-to-play games through a partnership with Tencent, but the title — known as Project Vanguard — eventually shifted to a premium release, before finally being canceled before it was ever shown to the public.
Virtala says that these setbacks were largely a result of pushing too far too fast. And in the case of Vanguard, the failure helped the studio realize that four games at a time was the sweet spot for what the company could manage. 'We started to feel that we had a bit too many projects for our size of organization,' he explains. 'We saw that if we had a bit more focus, it would help our other projects to succeed.'
But those failures don't mean Remedy is done trying new things. In fact, the studio's first fully self-published game, FBC: Firebreak, is also one of its most surprising releases. It's a multiplayer shooter, which might sound like an odd release from a studio known for single-player narratives. But as the studio looked to expand, multiplayer was one of the key areas the team wanted to explore.
'We want to explore ways of building new types of experiences.'
Firebreak is a relative baby step in that direction. It's connected to a popular game the studio owns, and it was built by a small internal team. While regular updates are planned — including 'major' releases in the fall and winter — Firebreak isn't a live-service game on par with Fortnite or Call of Duty, designed to keep players coming back with ongoing events and daily activities. It's a paid game meant explicitly to 'respect the player's time.' It's also a way for the studio to expand its capabilities without stretching the team too far.
'We want to explore ways of building new types of experiences,' says Mike Kayatta, game director on Firebreak. 'I like to think that we know what we're doing when it comes to these large, single-player story-driven games. This is how the studio built its reputation and what it's good at. When you're faced with saying, 'Hey, we need to diversify the types of experiences we're making,' do you really just want to just make five more of these linear, story-driven games?'
So far, Firebreak's release hasn't gone exactly to plan. It was greeted with mixed reviews from critics and players, many of whom complained that, while it maintains some of the weird and unsettling tone as Control, it's held back by repetitive gameplay and a lack of Remedy-style narrative flourishes. But the studio seems intent on fixing things, recently posting an extensive list of patch notes and other upcoming changes that cover everything from the onboarding experience to the UI. 'Several things have gone well,' the studio wrote. 'Clearly, not everything has.'
The success of a game like Firebreak is still critical for Remedy even under its multi-project structure. It's a complex plan that has kept Virtala very busy over the last 10 years. In fact, when I spoke to him in an empty conference room at Remedy's office, he was delayed because he had to prepare for the studio's most recent financial report the next day. 'Every single game is highly important for us,' Virtala says. 'There is no question that we are not fully insulated. But we are less dependent on any single game than we used to be.'
This feeling is only strengthened by the current realities of the gaming industry. It's a space where even a well-funded EA studio can't get a Black Panther game made, a Sony-backed multiplayer shooter in development for eight years, Concord, is quickly shuttered, and the likes of Netflix and Amazon are struggling to make headway despite huge investments. Remedy is currently in a good place, with a growing back catalog and multiple games in development, and while it has grown, it's still a fraction of the size of most other studios making big-budget games, which often have headcounts in the thousands.
While the last decade has been a big shift at Remedy, Lake describes his time at the studio as being filled with constant change, as the company steadily grew in terms of both staff and the scale of its projects. Even still, he believes that the current incarnation of the studio might be ideal for this multi-project structure, and says that he 'would be surprised' if Remedy continued to grow significantly over the next few years. While many large studios are seemingly focused on perpetual growth, the team at Remedy is happy to be sustainable.
'There were a couple of false starts trying to get there, but now it feels very much like we're settled,' says Lake. 'This is what Remedy is now.'