By Patrick Garratt

Developers struggling to create live-service hits have long regarded Digitial Extreme's Warframe with envious eyes. Launched for PC in 2013 and for PS4 and Xbox One in the following year, the game – a sci-fi co-op looter-shooter that's always maintained its free-to-play status – is unambiguously Digital Extreme's flagship title and cashcow. The London, Ontario studio has released other games since Warframe, such as the short-lived The Amazing Eternals in 2017 and Survived By in 2018, but nothing to match the popularity of Warframe, whose Steam concurrents sit at the 70,000-90,000 mark. 

So when the studio, now a Tencent subsidiary, announced fantasy complement Soulframe in 2022, the new team was well-formed but situated as a tentative part of Digital Extreme's Warframe-focused operation. 

"We do have a separation in terms of the people that work on Soulframe and Warframe internally," senior community manager Sarah Asselin tells Knowledge, but "Soulframe is a smaller team with a dedicated base, so we're very small and mighty. It sort of feels like being in a little startup within a bigger company." 

While the division is distinct, however, the membrane dividing the two teams is porous. 

"There's not a hard wall between the people," adds Asselin. "It's really beneficial that we're able to share our tech with one another… If we're adding new textures to the hair in Soulframe, we can steal some of that and put it into Warframe, and that's awesome." 

Digital Extremes president Sheldon Carter underlines the fact that the Soulframe team is not an internal island. 

"There have been times when Soulframe has needed a smidge of help on lighting and textures or something else important for an update that feels a bit behind and is about to ship, and we'll borrow resources from Warframe temporarily," he says. 

"The same thing can happen in the opposite direction. The great thing about both of these games is that we operate under the same ethos of 'we all lift together,' and we're happy to share these resources as needs arise."

The manageable cannibal

Carter adds that building the Soulframe team is a process of caution and longevity. 

"We do intend to continue slowly adding more permanent resources to Soulframe's development team, but we believe that slow and steady wins the race," he says. 

"When we hire staff, we truly see this as a long-term commitment from the start, and so intuition really is our strongest guiding light when it comes to creating roles or borrowing temporary resources from another team to meet a specific mission." 

The question of avoiding cannabilisation is obvious: as stable as Digital Extremes is, the prospect of players jumping ship from Warframe is real considering Soulframe's shared birthplace. Asselin admits the manner in which fans will respond to a second title is still blurred. 

"I sort of view it as a weird Venn diagram," she says. "I'm not sure on the proportions yet. There's always going to be people that just want to play Warframe, who don't care about Soulframe, and then there's going to be people that just want an interesting, intriguing, kind of weird fantasy game. And then there's going to be those people that just like Digital Extreme games. That intersection will, of course, exist. 

"Ideally, we don't release massive updates at the same time as both of our games, long term." 

Carter's aim is for the two projects to sit neatly beside each other in terms of playerbases. 

"Our ultimate goal here is that there is no tradeoff call, and that these two games complement one another as opposed to competing with each other," he says. 

"We need to be able to respect a player's time. There are so many great games out there to play, and a finite amount of time in a given day… I think we'll find the right release cadence to avoid any Hannibal Lecter scenarios of our own content." 

Digital Extremes can allay fears of internal structural disruption due to Soulframe's greenlight process proceeding with real caution. 

"The idea for a fantasy-set game has been in our minds for a long time and probably even predates our business deal with Tencent in 2020," says Carter. "It started as a side quest – a piece of concept art here, a moodboard in an office there."

Long-term gestation based on trust

Carter has clearly learned much from developing and managing Warframe. He's well aware that the game is nothing without an entrenched playerbase, and this relationship formed Soulframe's foundation from the start. 

"Trust-based development is probably the best way of thinking about it, in that as much as we're developing the game, we're developing trust and a relationship with the playerbase. This was a big part of our pitch, alongside expected items like growth tactics, plans to scale, release timing, and other milestones." 

Developing alongside the audience can be slow, but is seen as critical. Reaction to early demos found combat leaning too far towards a Soulslike style, prompting months of reworking which led to warmer feedback this year. The process follows established rules, with development in response to player feedback proving the safest route to market, especially in the live-service industry. 

"It's kind of like operating a restaurant in some ways," says Carter. "We want to create a certain type of food for customers to enjoy… What the customer thinks is far more important to the bigger picture, and so, to be honest, a lot of this is us eating that meal alongside the customer and setting some of the ego aside. 

"We have to do that, and we learned that with Warframe. It's a fine balance, but it's possible to retain creative vision and control while still tweaking ingredients to ensure the dish is most appealing to the customer's palate." 

With so much experience under its belt, Digital Extremes' approach with Soulframe perhaps shouldn't be a surprise, with the studio structured to develop it responsibly, avoiding any cannibalisation of Warframe's resources or players, and tying the fantasy title's launch to community readiness rather than any FY deadlines. Irrespective of how the new game ultimately measures up against Warframe's enduring popularity, Carter and Asselin's strategy – refusing to rob Peter to pay Paul – feels like the smart option within the treacherous live-service space of 2026.