Within the quiet metropolis of Espoo, a brief drive west from Helsinki in Finland, is an unassuming constructing that’s dwelling to some of the confounding studios in video games. Treatment Leisure is thought for getting bizarre. It began with the meta horror of Alan Wake, and has since expanded with Management, a sport that turns a bureaucratic authorities workplace right into a sinister and unsettling battleground. Their worlds merge the surreal and the mundane — which isn’t a foul description of Treatment itself.
On the day I visited, the studio’s vitality was relaxed and subdued — in true Finnish type, there are even a number of onsite saunas — and albeit a bit of boring, particularly for a inventive crew identified for the likes of the mind-bending Ashtray Maze or “Old Gods of Asgard” musical. However that distinction can also be one of many keys to Treatment’s latest success.
Within the wake of the covid-19 pandemic, the online game business has skilled studio closures, persistent layoffs, company meddling, and ill-fated video games that had been canceled quickly after launch. Exceptions like Treatment have been uncommon. Over the previous decade, the studio has been implementing a plan to assist it compete with greater, better-funded builders and publishers, steadily inching its method from a work-for-hire studio to 1 in command of its personal future. Because the business has shifted towards live-service hits like Fortnite and blockbusters like Grand Theft Auto, Treatment has taken huge swings with formidable and delightfully unusual narrative titles.
Now it’s making an attempt to broaden even additional with its first multiplayer — and self-published — sport in FBC: Firebreak. The stakes are excessive: it’s the proper instance of Treatment’s new method of working and a proof of idea for its bigger, extra expansive future. It’s additionally an odd expertise, marrying the surreal tone of Management with co-op play that bucks the newest on-line gaming traits. However to listen to it from the Finnish developer, it solely will get to take swings like Firebreak as a result of it nailed the entire boring stuff first.
“We’re this constructing,” explains inventive director Mikael Kasurinen. “That is it; that is us. We aren’t owned by anyone else, and I feel that realization brings that tradition of taking extra duty. There may be nothing above us that can save the day if issues go mistaken. It’s all on us.”
This wasn’t the case for a lot of the studio’s existence. Based in 1995, Treatment’s first launch was a fight racing sport referred to as Dying Rally. Just a few years later, the studio garnered widespread acclaim with 2001’s Max Payne, a hard-boiled noir with motion ripped out of a John Woo film. After a sequel, Treatment expanded in new instructions with the survival horror sport Alan Wake and sci-fi sport / TV present hybrid Quantum Break.
Regardless of its modest success, although, the studio discovered itself caught in a cycle of working from sport to sport. It didn’t personal any of its creations — as an alternative, they had been the property of publishers like Rockstar and Microsoft — and, except for the fast 18-month improvement of Max Payne 2, Treatment was solely placing out new video games each 5 years or so. That half-decade cycle meant that if any sport failed, so did the corporate.
This put Treatment in a precarious place, and it’s one thing Tero Virtala realized immediately when he took over as CEO in 2016. “At that time Treatment had been round for 20 years, and succeeded in relation to many standards,” Virtala says. That included releasing a number of hit video games and steadily rising in headcount. However Virtala says that “it didn’t really feel like sufficient” to have such a gifted crew and solely launch one sport each 4 or 5 years. Whereas it’s typical for video games to take years to construct, solely having one venture at a time left the studio weak in case any of them flopped.
Virtala helped spearhead a brand new path for Treatment’s future constructed on two pillars: One was changing into a multi-project studio, in order that it was much less depending on any single sport. Second, Treatment additionally wished possession of its unique creations and to ultimately grow to be its personal writer.
“It’s essential to grasp sufficient of the enterprise, although I don’t like it.”
A significant a part of making this work was guaranteeing that everybody within the studio purchased in and understood the plan, not simply administration. It appears like a controversial thought and runs counter to the best way the business usually works: whereas most studios function with clear strains dividing inventive and enterprise, Virtala believed that empowering builders to grasp the enterprise aspect meant they’d be higher in a position to make the best choices on the inventive finish.
“Persons are good,” Virtala says of his staff, “and they’re mature sufficient to grasp that if you wish to make inventive, formidable video games, it’s not potential except you have got the monetary foundation, except you’re aligned with the know-how, except you have got the folks and the manufacturing plans are so as. We attempt to present the groups with as a lot info as potential. After which the groups are in the very best place to strive to determine what’s the finest inventive path inside these constraints.”
And it appears that evidently the inventive aspect has purchased in. Sam Lake has been with Treatment for almost its total 30-year existence, beginning out as a author on Dying Rally. (He’s additionally the face of the unique Max Payne — literally.) He now serves as inventive director and is the lead author behind all of Treatment’s main franchises. “It’s essential to grasp sufficient of the enterprise, although I don’t like it,” Lake says. “If you’re making a sport idea, there are quite a lot of choices being made, and the extra you perceive about what these choices have an effect on, the higher you are ready to decide on properly.”
The actual turning level got here with the launch of Management in 2019, the primary sport launched underneath Virtala’s management. Whereas the concept for the story and world had been kicking round in Lake’s head for a while, the precise improvement occurred as Virtala was implementing broader studio modifications. He pushed for extra environment friendly processes and timelines, hoping to make video games sooner with out sacrificing the standard degree Treatment had grow to be identified for.
“These three years had been transformative for Treatment,” Kasurinen says. He notes that this new improvement type meant planning far more prematurely on Management, and viewing limitations round budgets and timelines as inventive challenges “that compelled us to reinvent many issues in a great way.” When it got here out, Management exemplified precisely what the studio wished to be: it was developed in a relatively brisk three years, was a brand-new property that the studio would (ultimately) personal outright, and was in improvement alongside one other venture in collaboration with Korean writer Smilegate. Creatively, it additionally allowed the crew to try a brand new type of open-ended motion sport and it opened up new instructions for the longer term.
Management’s success allowed this plan to proceed. Since then, Treatment has steadily expanded. Management was adopted by a long-awaited sequel to Alan Wake, and the studio has grown to 380 folks. It at the moment has 4 initiatives in improvement: a sequel to Management, remakes of the Max Payne video games, an unannounced title, and its first multiplayer sport, the lately launched Management spinoff FBC: Firebreak. Except for Max Payne, which is being revealed by Rockstar, all of its in-development video games are self-published.
Treatment now additionally holds the publishing rights for Alan Wake (the sequel was initially revealed by Epic Video games), and has created its personal related universe, which unites the worlds of Alan Wake and Management. In 2024 it partnered with Annapurna Footage to doubtlessly broaden this even additional by movie and TV diversifications. Branching out into new genres and mediums is an extra try to develop Treatment’s capabilities — and to raised insulate itself from the unstable whims of the video games business.
Attending to this second required some structural modifications. Treatment now has a number of improvement groups, with workers shifting between them as wanted, and it additionally has a singular setup with two inventive administrators in Lake and Kasurinen. Lake says that each of them need to be hands-on once they’re main a brand new sport, and so having two folks within the position permits the inventive aspect to at all times be concerned in bigger studio choices, even within the midst of an intense improvement course of.
“After I was deep into Alan Wake 2, I wasn’t part of attending weekly administration conferences,” Lake says. “I simply wanted to deal with [the game]. But it surely’s actually essential that now we have the inventive aspect represented on the corporate degree. So this association offers us flexibility. We are able to symbolize one another.”
Even nonetheless, the transition wasn’t at all times easy. As Treatment tried to develop right into a multi-project studio, not all of its enlargement makes an attempt labored out. First, the studio partnered with Smilegate on a brand new iteration of the favored army shooter Crossfire. The concept was that Smilegate would make the multiplayer portion of the sport, whereas Treatment would craft a single-player story mode, giving the studio an opportunity to make its first first-person shooter. However CrossfireX was poorly acquired upon launch in 2022 — marketing campaign mode included — and shut down a 12 months later.
Treatment additionally tried to get into the world of free-to-play video games by a partnership with Tencent, however the title — referred to as Challenge Vanguard — eventually shifted to a premium release, earlier than lastly being canceled before it was ever shown to the public.
Virtala says that these setbacks had been largely a results of pushing too far too quick. And within the case of Vanguard, the failure helped the studio understand that 4 video games at a time was the candy spot for what the corporate might handle. “We began to really feel that we had a bit too many initiatives for our dimension of group,” he explains. “We noticed that if we had a bit extra focus, it might assist our different initiatives to succeed.”
However these failures don’t imply Treatment is finished making an attempt new issues. In actual fact, the studio’s first totally self-published sport, FBC: Firebreak, can also be considered one of its most stunning releases. It’s a multiplayer shooter, which could sound like an odd launch from a studio identified for single-player narratives. However because the studio appeared to broaden, multiplayer was one of many key areas the crew wished to discover.
“We need to discover methods of constructing new varieties of experiences.”
Firebreak is a relative child step in that route. It’s related to a well-liked sport the studio owns, and it was constructed by a small inside crew. Whereas common updates are deliberate — including “major” releases in the fall and winter — Firebreak isn’t a live-service sport on par with Fortnite or Name of Obligation, designed to maintain gamers coming again with ongoing occasions and every day actions. It’s a paid sport meant explicitly to “respect the player’s time.” It’s additionally a method for the studio to broaden its capabilities with out stretching the crew too far.
“We need to discover methods of constructing new varieties of experiences,” says Mike Kayatta, sport director on Firebreak. “I prefer to suppose that we all know what we’re doing in relation to these massive, single-player story-driven video games. That is how the studio constructed its popularity and what it’s good at. If you’re confronted with saying, ‘Hey, we have to diversify the varieties of experiences we’re making,’ do you actually simply need to simply make 5 extra of those linear, story-driven video games?”
Up to now, Firebreak’s launch hasn’t gone precisely to plan. It was greeted with blended evaluations from critics and gamers, lots of whom complained that, whereas it maintains among the bizarre and unsettling tone as Management, it’s held again by repetitive gameplay and a scarcity of Treatment-style narrative thrives. However the studio appears intent on fixing issues, lately posting an intensive listing of patch notes and different upcoming modifications that cowl every little thing from the onboarding expertise to the UI. “A number of issues have gone properly,” the studio wrote. “Clearly, not every little thing has.”
The success of a sport like Firebreak continues to be essential for Treatment even underneath its multi-project construction. It’s a fancy plan that has saved Virtala very busy during the last 10 years. In actual fact, once I spoke to him in an empty convention room at Treatment’s workplace, he was delayed as a result of he needed to put together for the studio’s most up-to-date monetary report the following day. “Each single sport is very essential for us,” Virtala says. “There isn’t a query that we aren’t totally insulated. However we’re much less depending on any single sport than we was once.”
This sense is just strengthened by the present realities of the gaming business. It’s an area the place even a well-funded EA studio can’t get a Black Panther sport made, a Sony-backed multiplayer shooter in improvement for eight years, Harmony, is rapidly shuttered, and the likes of Netflix and Amazon are struggling to make headway regardless of large investments. Treatment is at the moment in a very good place, with a rising again catalog and a number of video games in improvement, and whereas it has grown, it’s nonetheless a fraction of the dimensions of most different studios making big-budget video games, which regularly have headcounts within the 1000’s.
Whereas the final decade has been an enormous shift at Treatment, Lake describes his time on the studio as being stuffed with fixed change, as the corporate steadily grew by way of each workers and the dimensions of its initiatives. Even nonetheless, he believes that the present incarnation of the studio is perhaps very best for this multi-project construction, and says that he “can be shocked” if Treatment continued to develop considerably over the following few years. Whereas many massive studios are seemingly centered on perpetual development, the crew at Treatment is glad to be sustainable.
“There have been a few false begins making an attempt to get there, however now it feels very very like we’re settled,” says Lake. “That is what Treatment is now.”