Skyrim - Success Motivates Remedy

I found this one interesting because it seems to me Remedy is ignoring the context of Skyrim's structure in using it as vindication of story-heavy games. From Eurogamer:

It is this gargantuan success that has convinced Remedy, creator of Max Payne and Alan Wake, that it's on the right track with its complex stories.
"The Call of Dutys and the Battlefields are doing extremely well in the US," Remedy head of franchise development Oskari Hakkinen told Eurogamer. "Those are the type of games that are in popular demand, so it's really positive to see Skyrim and other RPG games that have a lot of story in be successful as well.
"It gives us motivation to do story-driven games, because there's obviously an audience out there of people who enjoy story as well.
"Seeing something like that being successful, we don't need to consciously try to make our stories any less than they are, not try to make them any simpler. Our stories are not necessarily complicated, but our games are very story heavy. And, just to see games like Skyrim succeed, it's like, let's not try to make it any less story-heavy."

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I think they think it's important that a game without multiplayer can still be a top 3 game.

The singleplayer has narrative dictated by the developer, while in a multiplayer the narrative comes from the interaction with the other players.

I think Skyrim is more of a 'story' game than the current and future CoDs, MoH or BF's are and will be.

Anyway this is what I took away from the statements:
- A players experience determined by 'a story' (either open, branching or rigid) can be as succesful as a players experience determined by a contest against other players
- You don't need a focus on multiplayer to be in the top 3
- The story/narrative doesn't have to be short or simplistic to find mass appeal

skyrim has a poor story presentation. Don't even know why they put it up there. He's there because of a whole different reason.
So its not the writers fault at all, the designers didn't help the story at all, maybe engine limitations, bla bla

Depends what you mean by Story. And I don't think Bethesda and Remedy mean the same thing. At all.

Elder Scrolls games are backstory heavy and narrative light. They're strong on what happened before your character got there, from the big Rashomon lore elements down to the little 'what were these bandits doing just before I walked into their hideout', whilst being quite deliberately weak on the development and story of your character in order to get that 'go anywhere, do anything!' feel. Any plot that may occur can be fairly strong when shedding light on or changing the reading of that backstory, but when they get cocky and feel they ought to show character development or worse actual drama happening right now in this moment, the best they manage is hackneyed extruded fantasy product, and usually you get a lot worse.

I was under impression Remedy made character based shooters with heavy narrative and plot focus, an almost entirely different idea of what Story even is.

So yeah I can imagine that the 'level of complexity' of the story might be similar between them if you compare the backstory of an Elder Scrolls with the plotline of a Remedy game (not that I've played any Remedy games), but to think that means they appeal to the same audience seems an awful lot like wishful thinking to me.

At best you might be able to make a case that a niche exists for complex narrative and plot focused shooter games, that is as similarlly large and badly-served as the huge explorable backstory heavy sandbox game niche that Skyrim tapped into.

I don't think I'd find that case very convincing though.

He is right that Skyrim is a story-heavy game, as it's a game that contains a lot of story. However, unlike Max Payne it's not a story-diven game. But he's got a point, since Skyrim differs from a story-light RPG like Diablo in a way somewhat similar to how Max Payne differs from a story-light shooter like Quake.

Maybe by story-heavy they mean the balance of story-exploration vs challenge-based gameplay? In Skyrim there are some pretty long parts with no combat or puzzles, just idly exploring locations, following NPCs and listening them talk, and so on. In Alan Wake you similarly spend a lot more time exploring the game space and learning more about the story than fighting monsters.

My guess is the guys at Remedy had some doubts about whether these kinds of games have a large enough audience, or if they should go back to making more challenge-filled games like their earlier game Max Payne.

To look at it another way, one of the core strengths of both Alan Wake and Skyrim is the strong immersion they manage to create in the player, and they both spend a lot of time and effort building that. And seeing players appreciate that in Skyrim (and backing that appreciation with money) motivated Remedy to keep placing emphasis on that in their future games.