It was a natural marriage, and it gives us that capacity to grow our studio and grow our products with great management, great teams, great individuals. The conversation was, we can have two separate indie studios here in LA, or we can merge the two and have one studio that's really focused on the same goals. We've known each other for a long time and have great relationships. Some of these guys we had known for 20 to 25 years. Grue Games was really a spin-out of Activision's Beachhead studio, which we had worked with on Skylanders and Call of Duty. You acquired virtual reality expert Grue Games last year. We're working on five different projects, all unannounced, but all launching within the next year. Mobile is our primary platform, but we're also building a VR game and a location-based game. We're around 80 people right now, and we build games that we're really passionate about for whatever platforms make sense. That really forced us to rethink development, the way our process worked. We'd gone from Pandemic and EA where the team sizes were 100 to 150 people per team and the budgets were $30 to $40 million, to five people and $100,000: what can you do? To be agile, the first thing was to go very small and to have no money. And now you have things like location-based gaming. Mobile clearly is the leader right now, then VR comes out, but then PC and console games haven't gone anywhere either. We build games that we're really passionate about for whatever platforms make sense. We can't really be beholden to any one platform because the industry is changing. We were very focused on the social platforms, like Facebook, but that quickly evolved into being platform-agnostic. We originally wanted to build a new studio that could really start to think about games for today and tomorrow - like the new way of playing games, of building games. We were looking for what we wanted to do next in the industry, and it came at a really interesting time when clearly the industry was changing completely - going from big, boxed-product console games to mobile games, new free-to-play monetisation models, live services. Greg Borrud: It was really born out of that experience at Pandemic Studios. : Tell us a little about how Seismic Games came about. To learn more about the origins of Seismic Games, its five games currently in development and the firm's vision for the future, sat down with Co-founder and CEO Greg Borrud. The studio is independent and has a mobile focus, but its acquisition of fellow LA outfit Grue Games in December 2016 also marked its ambitions in VR and AR. Founded in 2011, LA-based developer Seismic Games has already worked on huge franchises such as Call of Duty and Skylanders.īut that list only increases when one takes into account the now-defunct, formerly Activision-owned studio Pandemic, developer of major console games such as Star Wars: Battlefront and Mercenaries, from which Seismic Games emerged.
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