Randy Smith Evergreen knows his immersive sims. As a designer on Thief: The Dark Project, he was there in the early days of the genre, and his credits include System Shock 2 and Dark Messiah: Might and Magic, as well as Thief 2 and Thief: Deadly Shadows. And he's pretty sure the genre is a bad fit for the AAA arms race.
"Myself and other folks who have worked extensively on immersive sims have a belief that the immersive sims that are being created today and are slated for the future are, by and large, thinking of themselves as [existing] in an arms race to be bigger and better," he tells us.
And this has been happening for a while. Just think about how Deus Ex: Mankind Divided pushed things in terms of fidelity. Or how big and expensive Arkane's modern offerings have been. They aren't competing with other immersive sims, they're competing with blockbuster shooters and vast open-world games from the biggest studios out there.
"Like, you just have to put more money into them, make a bigger and bigger immersive sim. It's got to be AAA, and it's got to sit right alongside Ghost of Tsushima and GTA 6, and it's got to be a game that's big enough to capture the public's attention. But I think that might be a misread for the audience size of immersive sims."
It certainly hasn't worked out for Arkane. Dishonored 2 and Prey are landmark immersive sims, but they were backed by a big publisher, Bethesda, who has since been swallowed up by Microsoft. Both games were considered commercial disappointments because Bethesda's expectations were not realistic for what has always been a niche genre.
Arkane Austin was shut down by Microsoft in 2024, following the poor reception to co-op vampire shooter Redfall. Arkane Lyon, meanwhile, is still hanging on, but only because of French labour laws. Microsoft reportedly wants rid of it. If a studio of this pedigree, with this amount of talent and experience, can't fit the square peg into the round hole, what chance does anyone else have?
Smith Evergreen believes the solution is to not participate in the arms race, unless you make something aimed at the mass market rather than the comparatively tiny immersive sim audience. He uses the Arkham games as an example.
"I think that the company that does this most closely is [Rocksteady with] the Batman Arkham games. Those superhero games have a lot of variability and a lot of player expression in them now, right? But they are still button-mashing combat fighter games with a huge IP."
If you want to make a proper immersive sim, though, it shouldn't be AAA.
"There's quite a few of us who think the way to do it is to be III or AA," he says. "So you're talking about a $3-10 million budget, a passionate team led by some of us folks who have experience with immersive sims or newcomers who just played a lot of immersive sims and really get it, making something that's a little bit smaller, more passionate, and can be made more quickly."
As he notes, the original Thief had a $3 million budget—but that was back in the '90s and would be $6 million in today's bucks. Still, there are ways to make immersive sims on the cheap, using existing engines, for instance, or evoking the simpler but still very potent aesthetic and fidelity of the immersive sim OGs.
"So it's not clear to me that the $3 million dollar Thief or Deus Ex-style immersive sim that you want to make in the year 2026 is going to sell disproportionately different amounts of copies than the $250 million one that comes out of a big studio. So I think that's an example of where the market is going, or [where] I think it should go at least."
I think the sales disparity is probably larger. Arkane's Deathloop had shifted five million copies by 2023, while indie immersive sims—Heat Signature and Gloomwood, for example—rarely reach 500k. But they don't need to!
Heat Signature was considered a success, and designer (and former PC Gamer editor) Tom Francis went on to make the also-well-received Tactical Breach Wizards. With lower costs and without a big publisher's inflated expectations, immersive sims can reach profitability a lot faster, allowing the studio to survive.
Given how vibrant the indie side of the genre is, and how close to death the other side is looking, I think Randy Smith Evergreen might be onto something here.
