How Digital Extremes built Warframe into a free-to-play sci-fi juggernaut

It’s easy to fail in the video game business. If you sit still long enough, this ever-changing market will leave you behind. Someone with fresher ideas will happily step in to take your place. But that’s what makes the success of long-running studio Digital Extremes so fascinating — it has adapted and survived for nearly a quarter of a century, and its ideas aren’t growing stale.

Digital Extremes runs the popular free-to-play shooter Warframe for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC, which has you controlling a cybernetic alien in various kinds of cooperative missions or in a competitive multiplayer mode. It debuted in 2013, and it has since grown both in terms of the kinds of content it offers as well as its number of active players. Warframe is now more popular than ever. With the launch of The War Within update in November, Warframe hit 68,530 concurrent players on the Steam PC gaming service, which was a new all-time high. Digital Extremes didn’t share that number for the game on consoles, but it is among the most downloaded games on PS4 and Xbox One. In November, it had more than 1 million monthly active users across all platforms.