Respawn Entertainment, the EA-owned developer most well-known for the Titanfall series and 2019’s Star Wars Jedi has announced it will open a third studio to support its growing development efforts.
As reported by Gamesindustry.biz, the move has less to do with its upcoming sequel Star Wars Jedi: Survivor and everything to do with its popular battle royale title Apex Legends.
Leading this new Winsconsin-based studio is Ryan Burnett, former director of engine production at Epic Games and Raven Software veteran of 14 years, where he worked on Call of Duty. fans of Respawn and its staff will know that the studio was founded by numerous key figures that also founded Infinity Ward, creators of the Call of Duty franchise. To add another CoD veteran to its payroll seems right, somehow.
For the Aussies in the audience who aren’t sure where in the US Wisconsin is, it’s in the northern section of what the Americans call the Mid-West, and which everyone else calls “The Middle Bit”.
The reason it chose Wisconsin is that the video game business there is booming. In addition to Raven and hundreds of smaller studios, larger publishers like Bethesda and Epic Games also have offices in the state. “Wisconsin is quickly becoming a central development hub here,” Burnett told GI.biz. “I’ve been here a long time working on FPS games, so we think there’s a really good hotbed of talent here we can pull from.” The new studio will officially be named Respawn Wisconsin.
The news of the new studio’s creation will be cold comfort to more than 100 Apex Legends QA contractors EA recently made redundant earlier this month, and the staff that watched the company torch Apex Legends Mobile just seven weeks ago.
Likely aware that he would be asked about these incidents in relation to the new studio’s creation, Apex Legends game director Steven Ferreira said that “(t)eam health is absolutely a top priority for us because we’re in this for the long haul. We believe in Apex as a franchise that’s going to be around for 10, 15 years or more and we’re excited to make that happen. In order to do that, we can’t just put everything all upfront, burn ourselves out and not be ready to do that in the long haul.”
Yes, you read that correctly. Respawn expects Apex Legends, in its current form or another, to stick around as long as the next fifteen years. It’d be giving Team Fortress 2 a run for its money with that kind of tail, but one has to raise an eyebrow when we know it all comes on the back of mass firings and the closure of a game that wasn’t meeting internal expectations. Regardless, that’s a long runway for any live service game to stare down, especially one that cycles in new seasonal content every three months. Apex is a good game, and it has a dedicated audience that loves it a lot. But can any live service game survive that long? Just look at World of Warcraft these days. Just look at the aforementioned TF2. They’ve been around forever, and though they’ve made concessions and updates to introduce touches of modernity as visual and design tastes changed, both are inevitably left to fight against diminishing returns.
Anyway, I think GI.biz’s piece is very interesting and illuminates Respawn’s thinking in a great many areas, while also holding its feet to the fire and asking its leadership to answer some harder questions. You can read it here.
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