The people at Skydance who made Behemoth are off now through the end of the year, after an overtime push saw them deliver same-day release on three platforms for one of the year's most anticipated VR titles.
Shawn Kittelsen, SVP Creative at Skydance Games, talked with me over video chat for nearly an hour this week as he walked through the development journey. Skydance's BEHEMOTH saw a December 5 release on Quest 2, 3 & 3S, PlayStation VR2, and, in a surprise perhaps even to the developers, also Steam.
Skydance also delivered a day 1 patch for PlayStation VR2, a week-of-release patch for Quest headsets, and a patch for PC as well. When Don Hopper played for a couple of hours on stream on launch day, multiple developers helped in the audience before heading back to work on updates.
By Friday last week, Don was back inside Skydance's BEHEMOTH with an updated version of the game, defeating the first of three giants across its narrative.
Kittelsen says during development, “we lost our servers” in “an apocalyptic...very Apollo 13 moment for us”. In the final days, a required quality assurance certification process meant that some reviewers received a pre-release day build to assess instead of the release-day one. When I saw the game in mid-November with missing textures and placeholder animations, Kittelsen says, it was because in the time it took them to bring the build on physical development machines from Los Angeles to New York, the game was approved for release in the storefront's system, "the dev kit decided that because the build had been approved and gone gold it decided to treat it as a retail build and you can't play a retail build on a playstation 5 dev kit, " essentially deactivating the full build of the game brought to show at the release party.
“There was overtime,” Kittelsen acknowledged. “On this, we never called a mandatory crunch. There were only a few times at the very end where we did ask people to work overtime, and said, like, 'please we really need people in,' but you know if people had plans that they couldn't cancel... we were not tyrants about it… I think that's just wrong to do to people that they work with. So, this team worked really, really hard.”
“Everyone's on break through the end of the year. And we gave folks some extra comp time to thank them for the overtime that they put in. It was definitely a galvanizing experience for the studio. We learned a lot over the course of developing this game, and we're excited to get started on some new titles, but we're also excited to keep going with this one… Arena Mode is something that we're going to build out into a much more robust feature for 2025, and then we'd like to inject even more content in there.”
Kittelsen said he had originally committed to his team, upon positive reviews for the game, that he would inscribe the following symbol to his flesh.
“The night before launch, I told them that, regardless of how the game got reviewed, I was going to get the tattoo,” Kittelsen said on the call. “And I am, I'm going to get it on my shoulder.”
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“We didn't get the word that we could launch on Steam until an hour and a half after we launched the game on December 5th,” Kittelsen said.
Skydance had started referring to the game as “Skydance's BEHEMOTH” rather than “Behemoth” due to potential “trademark liabilities.” In the days leading up to December 5th, the studio couldn't confirm the Steam release due to an “administrative issue” associated with the naming.
“It was 9:27 AM, I think, we got the email,” Kittelsen said. “And then we pushed go on launching the app on Steam at 9:32 AM. And the game went live.”
With the prospect of Android XR and visionOS joining the VR gaming market, I asked Kittelsen if he had any advice for developers looking to release games for more than two platforms simultaneously during the holiday season in 2025.
He replied, “don't.”
“We're 10 years in to really modern, sophisticated VR development, but this is still a nascent experimental pioneering medium,” Kittelsen said. “So if you can focus on one or two platforms, instead of three, four, or five platforms, my advice would be to do that.”
Skydance made a major investment in this title, but it is also an extraordinarily difficult year for VR developers. Survios delayed its Quest 3 release of Alien: Rogue Incursion to focus on PS VR2 and PC VR release in 2024, a decision Kittelsen noted must have been a “big benefit” to Survios while also “probably a very difficult decision.”
“There is a budget, there is a schedule, and running over that schedule has serious financial implications for any studio,” he said.
We'll have our review of Behemoth soon – we waited to assess it until after its post-launch bug fix was applied – and have had UploadVR viewers and Skydance devs sideseat with us through multiple Behemoth livestreams already.
Stay tuned for more.
