BioShock successor Judas won't have microtransactions or live service features, Ken Levine says

Ken Levine has a simple plan for his new game Judas: Buy the game, play it, and then you're done. No prolonged live service multiplayer mode or microtransactions.

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Judas, the new first-person shooter from BioShock creator Ken Levine, is a traditional singleplayer game through and through. The project has been in development for years, and it's been over a decade since Levine's last game, BioShock Infinite. Despite this long production cycle, Take-Two Interactive hasn't pressured Levine to bake in things like microtransactions into Judas in an effort to maximize return on investment.

In a recent interview with Nightdive Studios of all places, Levine shares his thought process on Judas while also clearly saying he doesn't have a problem with live service games, and doesn't fault developers who make them. The father of BioShock says that he grew up when microtransactions simply didn't exist, yet service games have grown to a €120 billion market.

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I grew up playing singleplayer games, and I grew up before certain types of monetization existed. Again, I'm not here at all to say 'this is bad or this is good.' That's not really my thing, I just know the kind of games that I like to make.

Judas is a very old-school game. You buy the game, you get the whole thing, there's no online component, no live service. Everything that we do is in service of telling the story and transporting players somewhere.

This is no diss on developers who have done that, because look, games are expensive to make and we're very fortunate that we work at a company where they believe in us enough that they will say 'okay, you've been working on this thing a long time, it's going to take a reasonable amount of money, and we're not going to push any of that stuff on you.'

But I understand why that happens, and I don't blame anybody for trying to make a living.

I understand the games that I want to play and I just want to have an experience with a game, and have that game entertain me--it's got no ulterior motives. Judas and our games have not had ulterior motives and I'm lucky that we've been able to do that because look, it's a difficult time in the industry 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 that...unwisely, the industry has decided that you need all these [live service] elements, but if you look at the games that have landed in the last couple of years, they are the games providing these [story-driven experiences]. Whether it's Baldur's Gate, or Kingdom Come Deliverance, or Clair Obscure, these are games that are traditional singleplayer games and they don't have that monetization in them.

I think that audiences have rewarded those games, especially in the AAA space because it gets expensive that people want ulterior methods of monetization. I'm just grateful that we're allowed not to do that because that then frees us to purely design the game for the players' experience.