The designer behind some of Sparks-based Firaxis Games' most popular properties — like the science-fiction franchise XCOM and Marvel’s Midnight Suns — is launching his own video game startup to try out a new, less violent genre.
Midsummer Studios, the brainchild of former Firaxis creative director Jake Solomon, launched Tuesday morning with $6 million in venture capital led by the Transcend Fund, with participation from Tirta Ventures, Betaworks Ventures, 1Up Ventures, F4 Ventures, Krafton and Day Zero Productions. Solomon will use the money to create a story-focused life simulation game similar to popular franchises like The Sims. The industry veteran is trading calculating health points and damage for programming a game based on the nuances of everyday life.
Solomon began working to start the company shortly after leaving Firaxis last year. Midsummer Studios is leasing an 8,000-square-foot office space in Hunt Valley that used to be Firaxis’s headquarters. Solomon is joined by two co-founders, fellow Firaxis alum Will Miller and Chief Operating/Chief Financial Officer Nelsie Birch.
Solomon’s genre shift is part of the increasing popularity of relaxing, comforting video games following the Covid-19 pandemic. Games like Stardew Valley or Animal Crossing: New Horizons, where players live as characters in a small town, became cultural touchstones as people looked for something to distract them from the pandemic.
“I’ve always been able to go back to hit points and damage,” Solomon said. “At the very least, I do not have those two stalwarts of my design toolbox. It has been interesting to attack this problem of trying to simulate life.”
Solomon views his still unnamed future game as similar to The Sims franchise and is hiring some of the talent that helped that series sell over $5 billion worth of games. The Sims is a game series that lacks a defined goal but lets players create characters and then put them in interesting situations. The 11-person Midsummer Studios team includes Grant Rodiekl, who worked for 18 years at Sims creator Maxis Studios. Solomon is creating a more story-driven experience than The Sims. Similar to games like Animal Crossing, Midsummer’s debut will be set in a small town.
“We're trying to talk about relationships,” Solomon said. “We're trying to make conversations meaningful and make the choices you make in your daily life meaningful.”
Midsummer will take a sandbox-style approach where players have a lot of freedom to make up a story in their head using the game as a template but will include some non-player characters and other elements more akin to story-driven games. Players will first input some basic information about the story they want to tell, such as telling the game they want to develop a romance story.
The game will then procedurally generate other characters and drama. Procedural generation is a mix of content written by humans and computer-generated content combined through computer algorithms. The technique is often used to create large game worlds.
“The idea is that you're writing a story every time you play,” Solomon said.
The video game industry has been in a bit of a slump over the past few years. Firaxis laid off around 30 programmers last year after the poor sales of Marvel’s Midnight Suns. Microsoft has laid off 1,900 employees at its video game subsidiaries Activision, Xbox, and Blizzard. Solomon believes that although the traditional “triple-A” large-budget, more expensive games may be struggling, there is still potential in more mid-market games with a smaller team. Triple-A games tend to be more expensive, often costing around $70 a copy, but mid-market games can go for around half the price at $30 to $40.
“This game doesn't require hundreds of people to make, which is kind of fortunate,” Solomon said. “I never minded having the big team on Midnight Suns, but it's definitely more difficult.”
