Ken Levine is back in the interview circuit for his latest upcoming game, Judas, and surprisingly enough, he’s starting to say things about it that the fans may want to hear.
In an interview with Lawrence Sonntag for Nightdive Studios, Levine talked about how single player games without online and live service components have been rewarded by fans, even if live service dominates the industry.
We’ve transcribed the full statement below, but here’s what jumped out for us the most:
Judas is a very old school game. Like you buy the game, and you get the whole thing. There’s no online component, there’s no live service, because everything that we do is in service of telling the story and transporting the player somewhere.
It may be a strange consequence of Levine taking over a decade to make a new game after Bioshock Infinite. But if you do think about it, Levine completely missed out on the changes the industry saw from the rise of mobile gaming, the return of VR, the attempt to launch metaverses, and most recently, the big push for live service. While there may be valid criticisms of Levine based on personal accounts, and on the merits of his gameography, but in 2025, Levine’s stubbornness about particularly sticking to live service has aged very well.
Levine also makes it clear that he isn’t dissing any developers who do make online live service games, explaining that games are expensive. He also recognizes his own privilege in that his publisher, Take-Two Interactive, is willing to fund his game, with a long period of development, and that they aren’t going to make him add those elements to his game.
Levine also cites the single-player games he believes fans have ‘rewarded’ with success for following this ethos. He name drops Baldur’s Gate 3, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Cyberpunk 2077, and The Witcher games.
We noted that it has been 11 years since Levine founded Ghost Story Games, and Jason Schreier alleged that all the original employees from that time have quit. Schreier also claims developers who worked with Levine in this time don’t have anything to show for it, heavily suggesting Levine has not been responsible in pursuing this project.
It’s this atmosphere that surrounds Levine and may continue to do so until we finally see Judas. But Levine does seem to have kept up with the times, and it just may turn out that Judas does end up becoming the kind of single-player game that fans also reward in the future.
You can read Levine’s full statement below:
I grew up playing single player games and I grew up before there was certain types of monetization existed. And I’m not here at all to say this is bad or this is good, right?That’s not really my thing. I know the kind of games I like to make and so we never made a game like that. Judas is a very old school game. Like you buy the game, and you get the whole thing. There’s no online component, there’s no live service, because everything that we do is in service of telling the story and transporting the player somewhere.
We’re very fortunate, like, this is no diss on any developers who’ve done that. Because look, games are expensive to make. And we’re very fortunate that we work at a company where they believe at least in us enough where they will say, okay you’re going to work on this thing for a long time, and it’s going to cost a reasonable amount of money, and we’re not going to push any of that stuff on you. But I understand why it happens, right?
And I don’t I don’t blame anybody for trying to make a living. But I like making the games I want to play and the kind of games I want to play are. I just want to have an experience with a game and have that game be just that. All it wants to do is entertain me, right? It’s got no other ulterior motives and Judas, and our games have not had ulterior motives.
I’m lucky that we’ve been able to do that cuz look, it’s a difficult time in the industry, as you know. And not everybody is as lucky as we are that we get to make a game that can really just pursue the player’s joy. My hope is, and I think, unwisely, the industry has decided that you need all these elements. But if you look at the games that have really landed in the past couple years, they are the games providing these whether it’s Baldur’s Gate, Kingdom Come Deliverance, Clair Obscur, Cyberpunk, or The Witcher.
These are games that are really traditional single-player games, and they don’t have that kind of monetization in them and I think the audience rewarded those games,
especially in the AAA space. Because it gets so expensive that people want other methods of monetization. I’m just grateful that we’re allowed to not have to do that cuz that just frees us to purely design the game for the players’ experience.
