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Almost four years after players first got their hands on it, you won't see a Warframe booth at PAX or E3, or ads on billboards. You won't find reams of op-eds about it on mainstream gaming sitesnot like similar games such as Destiny, at least. What you will see is weekly updates and patches, and a regular spot among the top 15 most played games on Steam by concurrent players. With 26 million registered users worldwide, Warframe is one of the most popular free-to-play games available. Digital Extremes did what no one thought it could, and the naysayers are now coming to them for advice.
The idea for Warframe existed as early as 2000, though back then the project was called Dark Sector. According to its first press release in February of 2000, the goal was to merge "the intense action elements of Unreal: Tournament with the scope and character evolution of a persistent online universe." It didn't happen, and the Dark Sector that released in 2008 was something altogether differentand according to an interview with Giant Bomb, the message from publishers was clear: don't do sci-fi. But Digital Extremes never forgot about the original concept.
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This concept trailer for Dark Sector from 2004 looks more like Warframe than the actual Dark Sector game released in 2008.
Before Warframe, Digital Extremes was a work for hire studio being contracted out by larger developers. It was partnered with Epic Games (then Epic MegaGames) to make the very first Unreal, working on the series through Unreal Tournament 2004. It worked on the first BioShock and developed the multiplayer for BioShock 2. One of the last games Digital Extremes made before starting work on Warframe was The Darkness 2, which creative director Steve Sinclair describes as a bit of a swan song for us in the old world of Youre a work for hire studio.
Youre not an employee within some publisher beast, Sinclair continued, Youre work for hire, and youre disposable. Digital Extremes studio GM Sheldon Carter lead the Darkness 2 team and echoed the frustration of not having full control. I work on Darkness 2 for three years with nothing except for a few publisher people and QA guys looking at it, he said, and then it comes out, and its polarizing but theres nothing you can really do about it. You just have to let it sit there and watch it rot.
You will fail
So when Digital Extremes decided to give the original Dark Sector concept another shot with a new name in early 2012, it was a project filled with passion. We had one month to make a prototype because James [Schmalz], the owner of the company, was going to GDC to show it [to publishers], said Sinclair, Holy ****, were we ever proud of it. They went all out on that first prototype, even getting the netcode and infrastructure working just to show they could pull it off. They set up meetings with companies he describes as the most powerful in the free-to-play world in 2012 and began to shop Warframe around.
We were just kicked in the ass repeatedly. This is gonna fail, this is gonna fail. It was an absolute crisis of faith.Not a single publisher said yes. Most of them said outright that the game was doomed to fail. In many cases, the pitch meetings were over before they could even start. Sinclair told me about a meeting they had set up during GDC, saying it once again all came down to Warframes theme. The executives walk in and say I cant wait to see what you have today, this is great, he recalled, and they turn, see the screen and see sci-fi, and its riiiiiip goes the record needle and oh its too bad its sci-fi, and the meeting was over.
Steve Sinclair, creative director
But they kept trying, next going to Korea. Sinclair wouldnt say exactly who, but he took a meeting with the creator of the largest free to play game in the world, and Im not talking about League [of Legends]. He showed a now expanded prototype of Warframe, and despite the publisher being impressed with its graphics, the answer was the same: You will fail.
Western game companies cant make free-to-play because they dont update them, they said, according to Sinclair. Because they spend way too much time making the graphics good, and they spend way too much time making a type of game that cant grow and evolve.
That was his opinion, that we were absolutely going to fail because we looked too good, and we wouldnt be able to sustain a game like that. And then he left. At this point, Warframe was out of suitors. We were just kicked in the ass repeatedly. This is gonna fail, this is gonna fail. It was an absolute crisis of faith. Sinclair even remembers at one point thinking, This was a mistake, were doomed. But Digital Extremes didnt give up, and decided to continue developing Warframe without a publishera move Sinclair said was definitely a Hail Mary.
[James] had a lot of faith in the people working on it, Carter said. He was willing to risk, and when you have someone who has enough foresight, or trusts the people who are working on it enough to let them spend his money pursuing something that a few people have said is going to fail because he believes in them or he believes in whats happening ...he believed in it, so he let it keep going. Without any outside funding, Digital Extremes had to lay off staff to make the game. It was all-in on Warframe, Sinclair said, and it was dark days.
It was a fight for survival."We were laying people off who had worked here a long time who we loved, said Carter, describing the time as the worst days of the company. Digital Extremes found even more trouble after its Star Trek game released in early 2013 and was critically panned. "Star Trek almost ruined us," said VP of publishing Meridith Braun. Digital Extremes later told me it let 48 of their roughly 180 person staff go around the time Warframe entered open beta in March and Star Trek shipped in April.
Steve Sinclair, creative director
It was a fight for survival, it really was, said Sinclair. I remember even dark places where I was, where we needed to buy servers and people wanted to get the better servers because concurrent counts were rising. And I was just screaming at people, Get the cheap ****, because we just laid people off and its not like were going to spend beyond our means here. Well-intentioned people on both sides, but it was very nerve-racking.
But there was good news: Warframe's Founders Packagesearly buy-ins for dedicated fanswere selling. A small but passionate community was forming, and once the ball started rolling, it never stopped. Despite being repeatedly told they were going to fail, Sinclair said they never felt like they had made the wrong choice once they committed, partly because of that founder support. That initial surge gave us the energy to say OK, were going to do this, and that let us go all-in. Even with the supposedly doomed sci-fi theme, Warframe was finding its audience.
Learning from rejection
Some of the credit for its success might actually go to the publishers who rejected it. Because they were so blunt with their doomsaying, Warframe was able to avoid its prophetic failure. Digital Extremes had the largest free-to-play developers in the world telling them exactly what they shouldnt do, and Sinclair said they used that to their advantage. We broke it down, Why are we going to fail? he recalled, and that became part of the early foundation of the game, which is why you see a game with procedural levels, which is why you see a game with a lot of permutations and a lot systems that work together.
The original design still had procedural levels, but called for story or quest missions to occasionally have static, hand-crafted maps. That idea was thrown out after being told in Korea that they wouldnt be able to update their game fast enough. Im glad that happened, Sinclair said, because otherwise we would have done things differently. We would have moved slower. And hes right to be glad, because a massive part of the reason Warframe is still growing almost four years later is how frequently Digital Extremes updates the game.
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The status quo is so seductive. 'Just let it go. Just keep adding guns and dont change a thing.'Carter explained that the most recent update was actually broken into three pieces to allow players to get some of the new content quicker. We had this grand ambition for it, he said, and we realized that to realize the grand ambition of it was going to take two or three months. Two or three months for a large update would be blazing fast for some other games out there, but in Warframes world of weekly patches and frequent changes, its a lifetime. Digital Extremes has an in-house sound studio and its own motion capture room, and many of the voice actors are employees at the company, allowing the team to record VO as late as the day before its being put into the game.
Steve Sinclair, creative director
And its not just about adding more content. Thats another lesson we learned from those people we talked to that said youre going to fail, said Sinclair, they were saying youll stagnate. You wont evolve, you wont innovate. Last year Digital Extremes did a complete rework of Warframes movement system affectionately known as Parkour 2.0. Just last week it completely redesigned the star chart and mission select screen, giving it a clearer progression path. With even fundamental game mechanics in flux, I asked Sinclair if he was ever worried about alienating current players.
That is the every day conversation, Sinclair said. The status quo is so seductive. 'Just let it go. Just keep adding guns and dont change a thing.' But Carter expressed that its important not to get too comfortable. Lets just redo the whole star chart and change how people flow through the entire game, he said, and thats going to alienate a lot of people, but then theyre going to get mastery over it and theyre going to love it. Sinclair continued by saying that deep in the core of Warframe is this idea that change is good, even though its painful for some of our players.
While at TennoCon, Warframes first dedicated convention, I spoke to many of the games most passionate fans. I asked why theyre still playing after so many years, and frequency of updates was one of most consistent answers I got.
Now Digital Extremes has grown back up to a 260-person company, even hiring back some of the people let go in 2013. Despite what the publishers said, Warframe is still on the rise. We hear from those [publishers] now," Sinclair said, "and theyre saying can you help us figure out Western free-to-play? Because for some reason we figured it out on accident, and they want to know how.
But even while asking for advice, Carter said those same publishers treat Warframe like a bubble just waiting to burst. It was almost like they thought we were at the top of the graph, and now were going to bottom," Carter explained, "and we always just keep going further up. Digital Extremes indicated that Warframe hits roughly 100,000 peak concurrent players across all platforms each day, and that those numbers aren't dwindling. Sinclair described the games growth as sort of a staircase pattern, saying every major update breaks [a record] compared to their previous highs.
A rogue success story
Despite its large player base, Warframe's success remains low-key. A lot of people havent even heard of the game nearly four years later, and Digital Extremes recognizes that. I think we are a little bit frustrated by how well known the game is here and there, Sinclair said, and Carter agreed, adding, We all think the game can break through and break out bigger, because we have the same feeling. We have this great game and we have tons of people playing it and loving it, yet it doesnt feel like its registered yet to the greater community.
Warframe is in a constant state of renovation. There are downsides to that.For one, Digital Extremes doesnt do much large-scale marketing for the game, possibly a symptom of the frugal origins of Warframes development. For example, they held a panel at this years PAX East but didnt actually have a booth on the floor like many of the games competitors. If we had a big booth, would that make it seem like were more real? Carter asked. But that flies in the face of what Steve was talking about before, which is were not going to spend money there, were going to put everything we can into the game. Carter pointed out that maybe thats changing, citing a Warframe cartoon they announced last weekend, but Sinclair says those trade-offs have been agonizing.
Steve Sinclair, creative director
Another reason for Warframes lack of widespread interest could be its high barrier to entry. A lot of criticism has been focused on the new player experience, which Sinclair admits they prioritize less than making content for current players. Its kind of why the new user experience of Warframe kinda sucks, he said, because every update its like well, we have our playerswhat can we do to engage them now? Do I worry about the marketing thats going to pull in the new users and that first hour that they have? Sinclair went on to say that they just want to make [Warframe] more interesting, but that the strategy does make the game harder to learn.
Warframe recently got a new PvP mode called Lunaro, essentially a ball sport played with the game's movement mechanics.As more is added, the complexity of different systems interacting with each other increases. Warframe is in a constant state of renovation, Sinclair said. We always want to make it feel like you can play this game in 2012 or you can play it in 2016. Its still going to be relevant, its still going to feel modern. Its going to still feel like we care about it every day. Its not abandoned. That comes with those downsides. Sinclair also explained that they do retire certain features as they go stale, but both he and Carter admitted even they cant remember all the stuff theyve added to Warframe at this point.
Digital Extremes focus on the very things people said couldnt be done is, for the most part, whats made Warframe so successful. It looks gorgeous, it kept the sci-fi themeironically, a setting that's all the rage right nowand when somebody said they would never be able to update it fast enough, they overcompensated by making the entire game about updates. In a way, Warframe has been designed as a frame for whatever new type of weapon or system designers such as Sinclair and Carter can think to throw into it.
I asked if there would ever be a Warframe 2, and they both smiled. Thats our joke, man, Sinclair said. We always joke about that. This is our Warframe 2 and Warframe 3 and Warframe 4 and all those things. Theres probably some marketing angle to be tempted to do what youre talking about, but I dont think so.
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