Geoff Keene is the design director of the acclaimed co-op survival game Abiotic Factor, which PC Gamer crowned Best Co-op in its 2025 GOTY awards. But if you want to understand what drives his creative vision, pay attention to his gaming habits. The founder of New Zealand-based Deep Field Games carries childhood memories of watching his father play Blizzard games through a doorway, and his first glimpse of Diablo at a LAN party where computers filled a basement like a mystical temple, a moment that sparked his hyper-fixation on video games.
These days, Keene's gaming library reveals a designer shaped by extraction shooters and vintage RTS design. During PUBG's golden age, when the battle royale was drawing everyone from casual to hardcore players, Keene and his art director played extensively together, bonding over the game and eventually becoming very skilled at it. That period of exploration and scavenging, of hiding in bushes and looting buildings, directly led to the concept for Arc Raiders, an extraction shooter Keene has become obsessed with.
Keene calls Arc Raiders a work of art, and notes that if he were to make an extraction shooter, it would be the game he would have wanted to make. What Arc Raiders does right, according to Keene, is that it understands it's a world you want to spend time in. It's not just mechanics or guns and attachments. This philosophy sits at the heart of Abiotic Factor's own design.
When the weight of game development presses down, Keene doesn't book a therapy session. He boots up Warcraft 2. After a stressful day at work, he'll load up a campaign level or simply click around, drawn to the comforting sounds and noises of the classic Blizzard RTS. There's something about the audio that soothes him, he explains, like playing an old song you love. Maybe it's the kind of thing where guys boot up Warcraft 2 instead of going to therapy.
Deep Field Games is now working on a new project while planning more updates for Abiotic Factor. A new roadmap is coming soon, with updates planned throughout 2026 and DLC already in development. Keene plays extraction shooters every Saturday with his partner and a friend, testing different co-op games. Deep Field was founded on making cool cooperative experiences.
Abiotic Factor is a 2025 survival game developed by Deep Field Games, set in 1993 with players assuming the roles of scientists stranded in an underground research facility in the Australian outback. The game launched early access with 200,000 wishlists on Steam and sold 250,000 copies in the first eight days. Within three months, it had sold 600,000 copies. After its full launch, that figure reached 1.5 million.
For a designer shaped by PUBG's exploration mechanics and Warcraft 2's atmospheric comfort, success seems less about chasing trends and more about building worlds worth inhabiting.