Indeed, having secured its future as an independent studio after the buyout, the immediate focus was just to survive. That's the belief we had," says Abrak.īut this didn't mean that self-publishing was necessarily the end goal in mind.
"We were running on the belief that the best years and the best chapters of IO's history was not the 20 years we had left behind, they were in front of us. After several job cuts, IO Interactive announced it would perform a management buyout in order to become independent but also retain the rights to the Hitman franchise in order to continue its vision with the series. The first game's episodic format did not succeed commercially, leading to Square Enix to divest funding from IO Interactive and look for potential buyers. While the success has been a vindication for the studio, this hadn't been a certainty. This, despite the conditions in these corona times, that we've developed this and then delivered this - we're extremely grateful and extremely proud at the moment." Hakan Abrak, IO Interactive "And if we look at it critically, this is also the highest rated game between the three of them. The interview was conducted by our own Chris Dring, and you can watch the whole session below. "If we look at Hitman 3 from a commercial perspective, compared to Hitman 2016 and Hitman 2, it's been 300% better commercially," IO Interactive's CEO Hakan Abrak told us during this month's GI Live: Online event.
IO Interactive finally concluded the trilogy earlier this year with Hitman 3, this time completely on its own terms as its own publisher. The World of Assassination began first through episodic instalments in the 2016 reboot of Hitman - before the studio became independent - and continued the series by partnering with Warner Bros, which published Hitman 2 in 2018. Much like Agent 47's assignments, IO Interactive's journey to completing the Hitman trilogy has been anything but straightforward.
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