Compulsion Games releases new documentary about the development of We Happy Few 

Just in case you missed it over the holidays, Compulsion Games has released The Cost of Joy: The Compulsion Games Story, a free 40-minute documentary that gives insight into the development of its 60s British dystopia, We Happy Few. 

The Cost of Joy “provides a raw glimpse into the reality of video game development” and follows the crew of Compulsion Games as they work “to overcome challenges and the Hype Machine while bringing their vision for We Happy Few to life”.

“When you go from a handful of indies to the world stage, it’s not all Joy,” the video description says. “In The Cost of Joy, Compulsion Games takes you on the studio’s origins, the development of We Happy Few, and their introduction as a Microsoft studio through archival footage and new in-depth interviews.”

The full documentary is available now, for free, on YouTube.

The Cost of Joy is just one of several feature-length documentaries focussing on Triple-A development released recently. In May, PlayStation published a new, two-hour documentary chronicling the development of Sony Santa Monica’s critically-acclaimed God of War reboot. Raising Kratos documents how the game came to be, following the team from the game’s earliest conception to its nail-biting E3 reveal trailer to finally going gold. It offers a fascinating insight for players to see how a video game moves from merely an idea to a fully realised product.

Playing Hard, a docu-movie that went behind-the-scenes as Ubisoft developed For Honor, came to Netflix UK earlier this year and described the movie as giving “unprecedented access to a highly secret world” of “the biggest entertainment industry in the world”. 

The documentary follows the creation of the game For Honor across a four-year period, including what happened when, part-way through the project, “the director’s access to For Honor’s production floor was revoked” and it took “many months and discussions for Ubisoft to reverse its decision and give the documentary’s production team carte blanche”.