South Korean game publisher Smilegate recently made a strategic investment and became a partner in Absurd Ventures, a game studio founded by Rockstar Games cofounder Dan Houser.
Houser spent more than 20 years at Rockstar games and drove the creative direction of the Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption franchises, which have collectively sold more than 550 million units worldwide. (Theoretically, that’s about $33 billion worth of games). Houser left Rockstar Games in 2020.
Through this agreement, Smilegate will have the opportunity to partner on Absurd Ventures’ new intellectual property, which has been in the works since Houser started the studio in 2021. I am looking forward to seeing the creative output of this combination, as Houser was part of a talented team at Rockstar that rose to the pinnacle of the game industry. This is a test as to whether he can do more of the same, this time with a South Korean juggernaut behind him instead of Rockstar and Take-Two Interactive.
It’s a big opportunity for Smilegate — the maker of games such as Crossfire and Lost Ark — to team up with Houser, who creatively oversaw globally successful IPs that are cultural cornerstones and rooted in immersive storytelling. I did an interview with Smilegate and Absurd Ventures to find out why they did this deal and to find some clues about what they’re working on. Houser is notoriously shy when it comes to press, but I did get to interview Harold Kim, vice president of business development at Smilegate, and Greg Borrud, head of games at Absurd Ventures.
Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.
GamesBeat: What can you tell us about this partnership?
Greg Borrud: This is a good combination of both Smilegate, which is very passionate about where we’re going in games, and Absurd, likewise very passionate about where we’re going in games. We’re both exploring publishing and developing and all these new markets and new opportunities. This investment is a signal of our mutual respect for each other and our desire to help work together to see what we can do to bring great games to players. It’s a minority investment, so it’s just that first step of getting to know each other, but so far it’s been a great partnership. We’re very excited about the future.
GamesBeat: Harold, what was interesting to you about Absurd?
Harold Kim: Smilegate is a unique company in the publishing industry. We come from South Korea. We were doing well in a lot of countries, but not particularly well in the U.S. or other western territories. Our bread and butter is live service games. We’ve been doing that from the inception of the company. We want to become a global company, a real player in the industry. When we look at some of the trends in the industry, one is triple-A. We’re not talking about money figures. We’re talking about–if you look back at the 2000s, one of the key features of how we defined triple-A was great narrative storytelling.
When our chairman, Kwon Hyuk-bin, had a chance to meet with Dan Houser over dinner, what came out of that meeting was that they had a shared vision. That vision is creating IP that’s memorable. Fun, but also memorable. IP that can be passed along through generations. Absurd has tremendous respect and experience in creating that narrative storytelling. Smilegate doesn’t have that experience, but Smilegate has live service operations experience. We see great potential in the relationships, endless possibilities. It was a no-brainer for us to make the call and get into this relationship.
GamesBeat: It’s a big commitment, too. You don’t know when something is going to drop. You don’t know how long you need to support the company. Reputation is everything here. It feels like you’re ready for whatever might happen, without knowing for certain when the first game is going to arrive.
Kim: Smilegate is unique in the sense that it’s a 100% private company. It took us five years to ship Crossfire, eight years to ship Lost Ark. Quality is important. We’re not bound by a public company’s obligations to shareholders. The only thing we care about is our relationships and quality. Any time we do deals, it’s all based on long-term relationships. We hope to create that kind of relationship with Absurd.
GamesBeat: Is that philosophy a bit of a rarity in the game industry?
Borrud: You can see why we were interested in this conversation. Dan and I have talked about this quite a bit in our conversations with Kwon at Smilegate, this shared passion and interest in making big games that will have a meaningful impact for years to come. We’re very excited that Smilegate’s interested in exploring narrative-driven games. That’s what Absurd is built on, storytelling and new immersive worlds, new player experiences. There’s a shared interest there, which is exciting. We don’t want to take forever to get to market, but we also don’t want to rush. It’s finding the right balance. That was great to hear for us.
On the flip side, we’re very interested in live services. We’re interested in what Smilegate is great at. We’re thinking about how we can thread the needle on both. And then also understanding the Asian market as well. It felt like a perfect relationship to get started. We’re very complementary to each other. That’s been borne out in a number of conversations we’ve been having for quite a while.
GamesBeat: What’s the draw for you in working with someone like Dan? What are some qualities that are interesting about him that maybe people don’t see from the outside? He’s a fairly quiet person. What’s most interesting about working with him?
Borrud: He is quiet. He’s not out there in public a lot. Even for me, starting to work with him, there was a bit of mystery. What I’ve learned is, number one, he’s a passionate game developer. I’m not sure anyone works harder than Dan. This weekend, right before a break, my email will be full of ideas and thoughts. He’s always on, always working. He’s someone who is truly passionate about what we’re doing.
The other thing is, he’s an incredible storyteller. Both from his training, going way back, and then everything he did on the games he’s developed. He has a really good sense of cutting to the chase. What will resonate with people? What will be new and different, and not derivative? We talk quite a bit about wanting to make games that will have a lasting impact, and that are also going to stand out and be unique.
He’s also very collaborative. We’ve been pulling together two game development teams. One team is in Santa Monica. I’m in our office up in San Rafael with the acquisition of the Ascendant team. What’s been great is, as we bring on all this incredible talent, Dan is very good at saying, “This is what’s important to me,” but then enabling the team to develop what’s important to them. There’s a strong collaboration going on with everyone. I’ve been working with him for two years now, and honestly, as someone who’s more of a producer–what I want to do is work with incredible creatives. He’s probably the best creative I’ve ever worked with.
GamesBeat: A lot of game developers can be unsure about what to do in terms of serving their fans. Fans always want to have more of what they had in the last game, but they also want something fresh. How does the team, including Dan, think about that when you consider doing something totally new?
Borrud: Certainly our process has not been, “Let’s build a chart of everything that someone is doing and find something that’s different.” It’s not driven by that. It’s driven more by what we’re passionate about, what we think will resonate with players, what is timely. As we think about things that will strike a chord with people, those are some of the things we think about. We do think about being different, but not just for its own sake.
Dan is one of the best, and has been one of the best, at evolving a franchise. If you think about Grand Theft Auto from III onward, culminating with Red Dead 2, how that entire genre of open worlds evolved, that goes to who Dan is. That’s the continuation of the story that we have, but instead of continuing to tell stories in those existing franchises, which are obviously incredible franchises, Dan had the opportunity to build new worlds and tell new stories and create new environments. That’s been one of the most exciting things.
The other thing Absurd has focused on quite a bit is how we introduce new IP to the world. We’re excited about the linear side of the market as well. We’re in this new age of synergy between game developers and game IP and linear IP. You’ll see things like our audio podcast we launched last summer. We have a series of comic books launching in the new year. A whole host of linear media opportunities. Number one, that allows Dan to scratch that itch. He’s a writer. Writers are going to write. It’s a great way to get that out. But more importantly, it’s a way for us to introduce our IP slowly, over time, so that when our game products do eventually launch–to Harold’s point, these take a while to develop. When these games launch, the IP won’t be unknown to people. There will be a very good, solid foundation we’re building on top of.
GamesBeat: You’re able to test your ideas in a less expensive way. You get them in front of people and see if they resonate.
Borrud: I’m always not sure what I can say about my private conversations with Dan, but he’s talked about that directly. “Had we known how an audience might have reacted to a character, we might not have killed that character.” We have ideas about what we think is going to resonate, what we think is going to play. But part of the magic in game-making is often those things that are unexpected. This is a great opportunity for us to seed it out there, see what resonates and what doesn’t, and lean into those things that are going to play.
GamesBeat: Harold, what are your opportunities to contribute to that creative process?
Kim: Smilegate has a brand vision to become a global player in this industry, as I said. We hope to not only help the company realize its IP in the Asian market territories, Korea and so forth, but also work together to establish business opportunities. I don’t want to call it publishing, but more like ways to go to market on a global scale with Absurd Ventures and Smilegate. That’s a goal we have.
I mentioned that we want to be able to contribute to creating IP that can have a long, sustainable life. Live service is our bread and butter. We hope to make a great contribution in that respect.
Borrud: From the developer side, we see so much disruption in the publishing side of the business. What is even defined as a publisher? With Activision being acquired by Microsoft, what defines a publisher? We’re keen to figure out what that model for bringing a game to market looks like. Smilegate is equally trying to figure that out. We think working together, we may find some interesting synergies there. We’ll see.
Just as the game development side has been incredibly disrupted by the rounds of layoffs that have happened–despite the market for games being strong, it’s crazy on the development side. We’re trying to do a lot of things that will make game development more sustainable. But the same kind of disruption is happening on the publishing side. We’re very keen to figure out what the new model looks like in 2025 and beyond. It’s incredibly exciting. That’s our shared interest.
GamesBeat: You mentioned live services as a key interest. Gamers love to argue about this stuff. They’re not necessarily automatic fans of live service games. “It’s just a money grab.” Are there attractive features to live service games that weigh against the drawbacks? Sony tried to launch a big live service game with Concord this year, a big new IP, and it fell flat. How do you have that conversation about what’s important in live services?
Borrud: To be clear, the number one thing that’s important to us is great game worlds and great storytelling. No matter what we do, a very strong, solid single-player experience is always going to be at the core of what we do. That’s just in our DNA. It’s who we are. But we invest millions of dollars into building these worlds, these playgrounds to be in, and when you’re only getting a game every five or 10 years, that’s also not serving the audience the way it should.
The question is, can we do both? Without going into what we’re trying to do, our passion is to build a compelling experience that everyone will invest themselves into. But then how can we allow them to continue to live in that world in a compelling way? We’re not saying we’re just making live services. That would be completely different from who we are as a studio. But when we’ve created these compelling worlds, we want to give players an opportunity to continue to engage with them.
Smilegate has been great at that. It’s not just the game world. It’s also community-building. The fans of Dan and his games, it’s all about community-building. That’s core to what we’re doing. It’s less about live service games in terms of trying to make an extra buck. It’s about trying to engage and build a community that’s on this long journey with us, 10 or more years of these games.
Kim: Smilegate’s role is part of creating good storytelling and good IP. We’re not saying we’re just creating a live service game with Absurd. It’s creating a world, creating a place where users can have fun and spend time and enjoy memorable experiences. The live service element is going to come much later. We know, as Greg said, about creating a community and nurturing that, to be able to make this IP a long, sustainable, generation to generation sort of thing. That’s the goal of this partnership.
GamesBeat: As far as the way you like to run the company, in the context of how the whole industry feels like it’s running right now, are there some distinctions about the kind of company you want to create at Absurd?
Borrud: Absolutely. Although it’s been a rough two or three years now, there’s an interesting thing for us at Absurd about this kind of reset moment, building a company from scratch right now. Number one, there’s incredible talent out there. We’re able to build a great team. But we’re also able to think about, how can we build these games and not have a 500-person internal team, a 1,000-person internal team, or even larger? Starting from scratch, we’re able to build with that mentality.
We’re leaning heavily into a core team. We have two offices, Santa Monica and San Rafael, two core teams there. We’re leaning into leadership that’s best in class. And then we’re looking aggressively at partnerships. How can we think about co-development partners, those best-in-class developers that can come in and work with us? We have some ideas there around the scalability of the dev teams to be able to still get to the triple-A quality, which is our expectation and certainly our fans’ expectation, but do it in a way where we don’t have these massive ebbs and flows of growing a team into a massive group and then having to lay them off. That’s been top of mind for me for years now, and for Dan as well. We’re trying to look forward to how we can make a more sustainable development environment.
One thing we’ve done with that, and this is what’s been great with Dan–from the moment he left Rockstar, for years now Dan has been developing these worlds, developing this IP. Before we even started bringing on many internal developers, he had two years of ideation and world-building and storytelling behind this. That means that this year, as we grow our internal teams, they don’t come and ask, “What are we doing?” Here is the playground. Here is the world. Here is the setting. Here is a broad outline of the story. The game teams come in and there’s a level of world-building I’m not sure has been done much for a new, original IP. I’ve worked with licensed products like Star Wars where there’s a tremendous amount of world-building, but for a new, original IP, one of the new ways of developing has been allowing Dan the time to develop these new worlds in a robust way. That’s going to pay dividends down the road.
GamesBeat: When you think about what gamers want in the future, how do you satisfy them? Maybe taking into account how tastes and behavior might or might not change. That window for gamers trying out new IP these days seems smaller and more competitive. Thousands of Steam games come out a year, but gamers try a brand new game maybe 5-10% of the time.
Borrud: That’s very true. I will say, it was nice to see the Game Awards this year. A number of new games are coming out. 2024 has seen a number of new IP getting introduced and being successful. There’s room for both. We’re not going to dethrone the games that are at the top, but we do think there’s an opportunity–I think gamers crave new content.
One way we’re going to get there is by having this slow introduction, where we seed, over several years, these IP to people. Even in our audio fiction right now, I’m surprised how many spoilers are in there. I listen to it on the way to work and think, “I can’t believe we’re saying that.” Over a series of years we’re going to build up this foundation of what these products will be. That speaks to a bit of what gamers want now. They want to engage with the IP they’re passionate about across the board, whether it’s Fallout or Last of Us or the Minecraft movie coming next year.
We’re not just looking at different platforms that people want to play on. I spent the last number of years at Niantic looking at gamers’ behavior as it relates to Pokemon Go. That’s a completely different community. Getting a breadth of how gamers are going to engage with their games, but also going across platforms. Traditional linear media is an exciting place. Short form video and some of these other media pieces are incredibly exciting. We want to create compelling worlds that players want to engage with, and then give them a number of ways to actively engage with them. All through the lens of triple-A, high-quality products.
GamesBeat: Can you talk a bit about how big you’ve grown? Are you going to keep expanding, or hold steady?
Borrud: We’re about 50 right now. We’re the right size for prototyping and trying out ideas without being too large. We have pretty big growth plans in 2025. But our intentions are not to grow too large internally. We want to grow to the right size. Then we have a number of co-development partners we’re excited about who will help grow our studio and our development size. 2024 has been an incredible year for us, starting from the beginning of the year. We see that level of growth and more in the year ahead.
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