Martin Hultberg - once the director behind Ubisoft's looting, shooting The Division - now has his eyes on the fledgling get-in-and-go extraction shooter genre, which he reckons can still reach the "mass market."
After leaving Ubisoft, Martin Hultberg began work on a brand-new project, the recently-revealed Exoborne, which is basically a shooter set within a mid-apocalyptic disaster movie. The game sees survivors on a climate catastrophe-ridden Earth pick up exosuits to scavenge for resources and fight one another, all while Mother Nature rains down terror and distinguishes Exoborne from other games in this PvPvE arena.
"A couple of extraction shooters have attracted quite a lot of players, but they're not really mass market yet," Hultberg explains in an interview with Edge Magazine 394, probably in reference to Escape From Tarkov and Hunt Showdown, the other big fish in this relatively small pond. "I think [Exoborne] has an opportunity to attract a mass market audience."
Hultberg explains that the "main competitive problem" with making another live service escapade is capturing players from one game and transferring them over to a new one. "One way to do it is to be first and to be disruptive," he says. "Another way is to be technically the best or offer social systems nobody else does. I think there’s still an opportunity to be the best in this genre."
Hultberg and the team at Sharkmob are going all in on that second solution: "You need to find the type of experience that you really want to create, and then you double down on that and pray to all the lords that it works out." With Escape From Tarkov currently knee-deep in a $250 pay-to-win controversy, the road is wide open for Exoborne to snatch its crown.
Exoborne currently has no release date, but the game will be available on Xbox Series X|S, PS5, and PC when it does launch.
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