Why Space Marine 2’s Massive Success Is “Dangerous” For Its Developer

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 enjoyed a very successful launch earlier this month, and now one of the top bosses at the game’s publisher has teased what’s on tap for the future. This includes potential story DLC or even a full-on sequel, but plans are still being formulated.

Tim Willits, the CEO of Saber Interactive, decline to share hard sales data, but said the game’s success can be “dangerous” for the studio.

“When you have a big hit and you have that internet kind of popularity, there’s more passion and there’s more responsibility for the quality that you do. And you look at yourself through a different lens. And sometimes that success lens can be a little dangerous because then you get so paranoid about making sure everything is great that you overstress about things,” he told IGN. “But it’s that success lens that really drives amazing games into the future. So I do believe that through the success lens that we have, we will just make far better products in the future.”

Space Marine 2 had more than 2 million players at launch and became the most-played Warhammer game of all time on Steam. Willits has also said it’s the fastest-selling game he’s ever worked on, stretching back to the numerous Doom, Wolfenstein, and Quake games he was part of at id Software over his two decades at the company.

Willits also revealed that the budget for Space Marine 2 was less than half of what Doom Eternal cost to make, though he did not divulge specific figures.

Space Marine 2’s big success means its developers can now “dream bigger,” Willits said, and this includes the possibility of story DLC for the game and Space Marine 3.

“Our game director Dmitry Grigorenko, he has proposed some story ideas that could either be DLC or a sequel,” Willits said. “We’re literally just catching our breath. This is two weeks out. We just need to get the dust to settle. But I can confidently say that we will not disappoint our Warhammer fans in the future. It’s too big of a success! I know that’s an obvious thing to say, but hopefully we’ll be working on Space Marine content for a long time.”

In GameSpot’s Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2 review, we called Saber’s sequel “a more than worthy successor to the 2011 original,” with “brutally gory action” that “brings the tabletop game to life in all its grimdark splendor.”