In 15 years of interviewing AAA game developers, I think this is the first time one's straight up told me 'Many people make games for money, but we make money for games'

Soulframe Liang in a livestream for Phantom Blade Zero.

I don't think you can go by a nom-de-plume like "Soulframe" without really, really loving videogames.

More than a decade before Digital Extremes started cooking up its Warframe sequel, young Chinese architecture student Qiwei Liang came up with the name as his internet handle, and has been using it ever since. It lasted through his stint as a grad student at Yale and his return to China after his first game, built in RPG Maker, racked up four million downloads—enough to convince him maybe games were his future rather than architecture.