We now have some new information on upcoming action game Stellar Blade.
As reported by Insider Gaming, the PlayStation store listing for Stellar Blade confirms that it will be a single player only affair. Coming from Korean game studio Shift Up, it’s welcome news to Western gamers, and an indication that Korean studios can adapt to global game industry expectations.
Shift Up was originally a mobile game company, that first made waves in 2016 with fanservice title Destiny Child. This was followed by 2019’s Goddess of Victory: Nikke, and more importantly, Project Eve.
Shift Up’s co-founder Kim Hung Tae is a famous artist in his own right, and has prior experience in video games with NCSoft, where he worked on Blade & Soul. Many of the people working on Stellar Blade also worked with Kim on Blade & Soul.
While Shift Up is certainly not the only Korean game developer seeking to enter the global market (see Round 8 Studios and Lies of P), they seem to still be a bit set in their ways. Their prior games was quite heavy on the fanservice as well. While there is a market for these kinds of games in the West, they reflect a focus on market trends and tropes in Korea, and to a certain extent, Japan and China as well.
But the move to single player is significant, as it indicates a desire to adapt to the global console video game market.
As this Korea Times article explains, the local video game market is in crisis because the developers saturated it with too many MMORPGs. Korean game studios all heard the call to make games in other genres other than MMORPGs. They are also seeing a need to branch out to consoles, and thereby, the global market.
And so we get new games like this, and Lies of P, and we can expect to see more games coming from Korean game studios in the near future. While Korean game companies tried to expand to the West before, this will be a more sustained, and possibly long term effort, as these game studios are needing to adapt to survive.
As for Stellar Blade, we still haven’t received too many details about its release. If Shift Up can release it this year as planned, it will be part of one of the biggest years in the industry. But, it also could just get swept up in all the noise from bigger titles releasing alongside it. It all certainly depends on when they reveal that final release date, or a potential delay.
Stellar Blade will be releasing exclusively to the PlayStation 5, and was announced for release in 2023.
