Respawn Entertainment has established a new studio in Vancouver, Canada. The new team will be led by Steven Ferreira, he is better known for being the Design Director for United Front Games. “When you look at Vancouver, it’s one of our [EA’s] biggest studio locations,” said Henry Lee, head of operations, in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz. “And Vancouver is full of talented people in the games industry, so there was a natural fit with Steven coming on board with his core team and really establishing that foundation. Now we’re just adding the missing pieces to it.”
“This is a great opportunity, not just for the Vancouver studio to bring some new creative challenges to people already there, but also to the local industry in terms of being part of the Apex Legends roadmap,” added Lee. “So we’re very excited about bringing this to Vancouver and hopefully greater Canada as well, because we can tap into much more of a talent base broadly.”
The success of Apex Legends is probably EA’s motivation to open up a new studio close to some of the biggest EA developers, right now, the Respawn Entertainment California is the only focused on the new content for Apex Legends, EA plans to hire 80 developers in Vancouver in order to free California to work on different projects.
“You invest in the people you’re working with, and as long as you can carve out that time and not get sucked into the day-to-day live service, the innovations will happen,” qualified game director Chad Grenier. “At Respawn we’ve already got a lot of innovations underway… The trouble is we can’t do all the innovations we want—there are just too many. How do you choose which ones to run with, and which ones are best for the game? And building a team in Vancouver is only going to help us bring more to the game.”
Source: GamesIndustry
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