Starbreeze CEO Mikael Nermark has been emphatic in his proud support for the work he and his team did on the FPS reboot Syndicate, suggesting that there were always going to be those who disagreed with the decision to reboot the franchise on a fundamental level, and that those parties "were never ours to win".

"Yes, I'm still proud of it," he told EDGE. "To have the courage to reboot the franchise… We knew from the get-go that there was going to be a small but very vocal [group] of gamers and journalists that was going to hate us whatever route we took.

"If we didn't do an exact copy of the game, they'd hate us. If we did do an exact copy, they'd say we didn't innovate. They were never ours to win; it was a lost battle from the get-go.

"But I'm proud of what the team did and what we made, and I'm especially proud of the co-op; I think that really shows what we wanted to do with the game, and Starbreeze's DNA."

However, Syndicate did not meet EA's expectations, with Frank Gibeau saying "Syndicate was something that we took a risk on. It didn't pay off - it didn't work" following relatively poor sales, with around only 150,000 copies sold worldwide.

"I don't have any response to what Frank said," Nermark responded. "I think both EA and Starbreeze can look back at it and say that we could have done stuff differently. [But] if you ask anyone about any game in production they probably would say the same thing.

"In comparison to other triple-A teams, in terms of people and money, we're very small. I'm not going to tell you exactly what Syndicate cost to make - I can't due to NDAs - but it was substantially less than what the big in-house publishing studios would have spent, definitely."