Bloober Team Talks About Their History And ‘The Medium’ in New Interview: “We Wanted to Be the Blumhouse of the Games Industry”

With Sony and Microsoft getting ready to duke it out in the next generation of consoles, Bloober Team are setting their sights on capitalizing on the battle with their upcoming projects like The Medium and Death of Rose, the latter of which is being published by Feardemic, Bloober Team’s publishing arm. And, in a recent interview with Gamesindustry.biz discussing the developer’s history, Bloober Team’s Piotr Babieno talks about aiming high with their projects, even comparing themselves to Blumhouse.

“From the first day we talked about [making] horror games, we said we wanted to be the Blumhouse of the games industry,” says Babieno. That’s a bold claim for the company that started out in 2006 as Nibris with a Wii game called Sadness (which was eventually cancelled), but even Babieno admits that they started out on the wrong foot. “In the end we realised that we don’t have the experience. And the people who we hired didn’t have the experience either.”

Rechristened Bloober Team, the developer started out small with admittedly lacklustre results with their first game, Basement Crawl. “I put the ambition to create huge [narrative] horror games into my pocket, because our investors wanted to work on something that would bring in money,” says Babieno. “And for project after project, we worked on what we thought would be successful [games], but at the end of the day we were in the middle. Sometimes those projects were successful from a financial point of view, sometimes not.”

The team’s next game, Layers of Fear, kicked off a string of games that helped to get Bloober Team’s foothold in the industry as not only a competent developer, but also one for horror fans.

Elsewhere in the interview, Babieno talks about how their initial attempts to create The Medium for the current generation of hardware proved difficult technologically, which made them decide to move to the next generation. As well, since it’s still very much a thing, Babieno touches on the numerous delays that developers have faced with COVID-19, and how it really does affect the team.

The Medium is set for launch on Xbox Series X and PC by the end of this year alongside Observer: System Redux, which is also due out for PlayStation 5. Death of Rose is set for release later this year.