Dear Esther Dev Hopes To 'Do A Mojang', Start Bigger Projects

Dear Esther, the revamped first-person 'ghost story' powered by Valve's Portal 2 engine, launches on Steam next week, and it's success will determine how quickly developer TheChineseRoom can begin work on multiple new projects.

"Hopefully we'll either do a Mojang and make fifty gazillion dollars and be able to pay for basically whatever we like," developer and writer Dan Pinchbeck told NowGamer.

TheChineseRoom makes "story driven first-person games" and has two other projects currently in development.

"It's funny, for all the aspirations about it I've had, it's reduced down to two things really. One, we want players to have a great experience and get loads out of it; and two, we want to sell enough units to keep the studio developing - I've got a great team working on gameB and Everybody's At The Rapture and I want to keep them employed once those projects come down," Pinchbeck added.

With recent Indie game sales effectively building studios, especially in the case of Minecraft and Mojang, one hit could effectively lead to all types of varied and innovative titles - Pinchbeck hopes to launch the two other games by the end of the year, before moving onto "something bigger" - but doesn't want to lose that AAA sheen.

"Esther sets the bar for production quality now, I don't think I'd be happy making a game that wasn't coming in with that level of fidelity and finish," he adds.

Look out for our full interview with the Dear Esther team next week.

Dear Esther hits Steam on 14 February.