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Fans of Deus Ex, Dishonored and Gloomwood like to roll the words ‘immersive sim’ around their mouths as often as possible, savouring the fond associations with first-person drawer-rifling and guilt-ridden murder.
Yet there’s something like consensus emerging among the makers of these games: it’s really hard to sell an immersive sim while calling it by its name. “Is it a good marketing term? No,” says New Blood Interactive CEO Dave Oshry. “It sucks. It’s awful.”
New Blood was first known for its boomer shooters, namely Dusk and Ultrakill, but has sunk years into two early access imsims, the well-regarded Gloomwood and Fallen Aces. Oshry likes to joke that he’s “dumping all the money into immersive sims so we can go broke like the great studios that came before us, like Looking Glass.”
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Yet he’d never heard the term immersive sim until Gloomwood lead Dillon Rogers started work on his Thief-and-Resi-riffing open world. “He’s like, ‘That’s what these are called’. I’m like, ‘I have never heard that before in my life. What the fuck are you talking about?'”
Oshry wasn’t new to the genre. He’d grown up adoring Deus Ex and Thief. “But Thief was a stealth game,” he protests. “I called it a stealth game. Deus Ex I called an FPS-RPG because it was an FPS, but it was an RPG. You had points that you put in stuff. That’s what an RPG is, like Diablo.”
Of course, ploughing points into skills and traits is something that’s proliferated across mainstream games of all kinds in the decades since. But it’s true: back in the year 2000, it was largely the preserve of RPGs. Deus Ex, with its dialogue, narrative choices and deadly greasel combat seemed a natural enough addition to that genre.
“System Shock and Deus Ex, they were RPGs,” Oshry says. “People called them RPGs. That’s the funny thing about an immersive sim. You’re immersed in this world. You’re building your character. Yeah, that’s called an RPG, brother. That’s a roleplaying game.”
Does this age-old squabble over definitions really matter, so long as the games are good? Well, perhaps it does. Because immersive sims are considered to be niche and unworkable by many major publishers. Whereas RPGs? “They make lots of money and sell lots of copies,” Oshry says. “You could argue that Baldur’s Gate 3 is an immersive sim, because of the way that Larian builds their games. It’s not first-person but you can stack boxes and use spells to pull things towards you and solve problems in unique ways.”
The argument is one I’ve heard made before—in fact, I’ve even heard senior Larian developers refer to their Forgotten Realms opus as an immersive sim. But you won’t find that phrase anywhere in its trailers or on its Steam page. “If you market something as an RPG, I think you’ll do better than marketing it as an immersive sim,” Oshry says.
A couple of years ago, Arkane founder Raphael Colantonio told me the same thing. “Nobody wonders what an RPG is,” he said. “We might debate whether the Bethesda RPGs are an immersive sim or not, but who cares? The market just understands what an RPG is. Same with Baldur’s Gate. If you say, ‘This is an immersive sim,’ you’re going to have a tiny percentage of people that are super excited because they know what it means. And then the other ones, they’re going to be like, ‘What is it?'”
During the making of Arkane’s Prey, the developer wasted lots of time explaining to its intended audience what an imsim was. Time that might have been better spent selling potential players on the joyous possibilities of the gloo cannon. Bethesda was disappointed by Prey’s sales, and set the studio to work on Redfall instead—a route that ultimately led to Arkane Austin’s closure under Xbox.
You could argue that ‘immersive sim’ is an inside baseball term that broke containment. For the alumni of Looking Glass, it was crucial—a way of codifying a shared set of principles in a ’90s era when the vocabulary of game design was far from locked down. Figures like Warren Spector began to spread its use through interviews and postmortems. And for fans, adopting the term felt a little like joining a club.
“I think the term immersive simulation, if you know what that is, then you know what you’re getting,” Oshry says. “‘Oh, cool! It’s a game where I can solve problems by stacking boxes and crawling through vents and stabbing people in the back.’ But it’s not a good marketing term. And I don’t think it helps. It’s very niche, because if you say immersive sim, people are like, ‘So it’s a simulator?’ Mainstream people have no idea what that means, and the people who know what it means, you didn’t have to sell it to them anyway. Because they’re looking for games like that.”
When New Blood first started promoting Gloomwood, Oshry attempted to sidestep the imsim problem, but created a new one. “In my marketing genius, I was like, ‘Let’s call it Thief with guns,'” he says. “It’s an easy sell. But it’s a blessing and a curse bringing in all these fans of the Thief games who expect all these things from you. And Gloomwood’s obviously not just Thief with guns, it takes from Call of Cthulhu and Resident Evil. Like most of our games, it’s a mishmash of so many genres. ‘Thief with guns’ was a really easy elevator pitch. But it comes with a lot of expectations.”
By contrast, ‘boomer shooter’ has proven to be a straightforwardly useful marketing term throughout New Blood’s existence. “There’s people who are like, ‘What do you mean, boomer shooter? Boomers didn’t play these games.'” Oshry says. “That’s not what it means. Also, yes, they do. My dad was a boomer, he played these games. I guess John Romero and John Carmack are Gen X, but Sandy Peterson sure as fuck is a boomer. But you say boomer shooter, people know exactly what it is. Yeah, it’s a game like Doom and Quake and stuff.”
You’ll notice that, when New Blood bundles Gloomwood and Fallen Aces together with the Stalker-like Blood West on Steam, they’re collectively called ‘the stealth trilogy’. “Because that’s what draws people in,” Oshry says. “If we called it the immersive sim trilogy, nobody would fucking buy the games.”
