During the summer, seasoned game creator Glen Schofield announced that he was stepping away from the video‑game industry. Schofield’s résumé reads like a timeline of modern gaming history, beginning with the 1992 title Barbie: Game Girl and later leading Sledgehammer Games, the studio behind Call of Duty.
He has also held senior roles at Crystal Dynamics and EA’s Visceral Games, and most recently he headed Striking Distance Studios, a subsidiary of Korean powerhouse Kraft on. Now retired from the corporate side of development, Schofield spends his days in a garage‑turned‑studio, producing artwork.
In a recent interview with GamesIndustry.biz, he displayed a range of his creations: epoxy‑coated skulls, a stylized painting of a sports car, and a piece of driftwood he plans to carve into a whale. Though he has left game production behind, the creative engine that powered his career still hums inside him.
"I’m torn between just painting and sculpting, building this new artistic career I don’t really need, or staying involved in video games," Schofield admitted. "It’s a constant tug‑of‑war." His final major game effort was The Callisto Protocol, released in 2022.
The sci‑fi survival‑horror title bears thematic resemblance to his earlier work on Dead Space, though he stresses it is not a spiritual successor. Development was midway when the COVID‑19 pandemic struck, throwing the schedule into chaos.
"COVID was a real pain in the ass," Schofield said, recalling how the team had to improvise on the fly, re‑architecting pipelines and dealing with management decisions that added friction. Remote work proved especially challenging for the veteran. He prefers the energy of a physical studio, where spontaneous hallway conversations and daily face‑to‑face interactions spark ideas.
In a remote setting, he found himself juggling countless individual calls and Zoom meetings, trying to replicate the organic collaboration that a hundred‑person office naturally provides. "I’m a creative leader and a business leader, but I don’t want to spend eight hours a day scheduling or on endless meetings," he explained.
"Give me direction, and let me focus on the creative side." Despite his misgivings about remote collaboration, Schofield and his team managed to ship The Callisto Protocol. However, Krafton’s decision to move the launch up to December 2022—months earlier than the March 2023 release date Schofield had been promised—proved to be the final straw. The early launch was intended to compensate for pandemic‑related delays, but it forced the team to cut content, trim bosses, and remove levels.
"I was forced to ship the game. I’m angry at myself," he said. "We were dealing with COVID, losing staff to illness, and even had to shut down our small Spain office for a time. Health became the priority; making a game became secondary." Complicating matters further, Krafton lacked an internal publishing or marketing division for a single‑player, physical‑release title, so Striking Distance built those capabilities from scratch.
Additionally, the mandate to release on both PlayStation 5 and the older PlayStation 4 added roughly $20 million in extra costs, especially problematic amid a global chip shortage that made development kits scarce. When the game finally hit shelves, reviews were mixed and sales fell short of Krafton’s expectations.
"They thought Callisto was a complete failure," Schofield recalled. "What they didn’t realize was that we were constantly patching, releasing DLC, and putting out 86 updates to bring the experience up to where it needed to be." A sequel was pitched—a larger, more ambitious follow‑up set on a massive, centuries‑old space‑station junkyard—but Krafton declined after the first title’s performance.
Schofield described the proposed sequel as moving from an "outbreak" narrative to a full‑blown "plague" scenario, with sprawling environments and ships that had accumulated over generations. In 2023, Schofield departed Striking Distance.
Earlier this year he posted on LinkedIn about the "tough" and "bittersweet" state of industry giants Activision Blizzard and Electronic Arts, noting the former’s $69.7 billion sale to Microsoft and the latter’s $55 billion buyout by a Saudi‑led investor group. When asked whether a chapter of the industry was ending, he agreed, pointing to the departure of long‑time executives like Phil Spencer and Bobby Kotick. "Everyone blames AI, but the writing was on the wall with those sales," he said. "The creative voice has been pushed to the margins." Schofield argues that money has become the dominant metric, eclipsing creativity.
He believes investors lack the expertise to hire and nurture creative talent, and that the industry’s focus on ever‑larger budgets has eroded the collaborative spirit that once defined AAA development. "We were in an arms race for the best graphics, the best effects, the biggest budgets," he reflected. "I’d love to make a game for under $150 million again—something tighter, with a cohesive team, not a sprawling outsourced operation." To achieve that, he revisits an idea he once floated at Gamescom Asia and the Thailand Game Show: reuse assets from earlier titles in a way that feels organic to the story.
"A creative idea can save more money than AI can right now," he told IGN. "If you repurpose existing content cleverly, you could shave $25 million off a $85 million budget, bringing it down to what we used to consider a true AAA cost." While Schofield acknowledges AI’s potential, he refuses to treat it as a simple utility. He describes tools like Midjourney as a new medium he incorporates alongside traditional painting, Photoshop, and photobashing. "It’s not a tool; it’s a technique I’ve added to my toolbox," he said.
He envisions a future where AI is deployed strategically—optimizing collision detection, enhancing camera work, or building specific modules—rather than being a blanket solution for every aspect of development. In summary, Glen Schofield’s retirement has not dimmed his creative spark. He remains passionate about games, critical of remote work, skeptical of AI as a catch‑all, and nostalgic for a time when smaller, tightly knit teams could deliver high‑quality experiences without astronomical budgets.
His reflections offer a window into the evolving priorities of the AAA landscape and a reminder that ingenuity—whether through clever asset reuse or selective AI integration—can still be the most valuable currency in game development.