The publisher of Call Of Duty has set up a new development studio in Poland and is already working on a new narrative-based AAA game.
It’s no surprise to find Activision at the centre of the current crisis in video games, given the publisher clearly anticipated many of the problems and trends which Microsoft and Sony are only now hurriedly trying to address.
Activision may be the biggest video games publisher in the West, but they publish almost nothing else other than Call Of Duty. The only exceptions are the occasional minor release like Crash Bandicoot 4, while franchises like Guitar Hero and Skylanders are quickly run into the ground after only a few years.
Unfortunately, this idea of making only a very small number of very big games is quickly becoming the fashion for all publishers, as evidenced just this week by Ubisoft in their yearly financial results. But while Activision has now set the tone for the whole industry they’re also providing an unexpected ray of hope.
To the surprise of all, Activision has announced it has opened a new development studio in Warsaw, Poland. It’s called Elsewhere Entertainment and will be supported by unspecified ‘additional resources’ in the US.
It’s described as being ‘exclusively focused on creating a new narrative-based and genre-defining AAA franchise’, which seems to be a reassurance that Activision won’t try to use it as a Call Of Duty support studio.
‘Built from the ground up, Elsewhere Entertainment is a premier and standalone studio dedicated to establishing an environment that inspires bold and diverse ideas,’ claims Activision’s announcement.
‘The team’s underlying mission encourages everyone to explore and collaborate creatively to craft a franchise with an enduring legacy that resonates far beyond games.’
Although it is a support studio for Call Of Duty, Infinity Ward Poland already exists in Krakow, while many of the team at Elsewhere previously worked on The Witcher and Cyberpunk 2077 – both of which are made by Polish developer CD Projekt.
Other staff are veterans of games including Naughty Dog’s The Last Of Us and Uncharted, Bungie’s Destiny, and The Division and Far Cry from Ubisoft.
Both Activision and a report on Windows Central suggest that the studio has been up and running for a while now, which also implies that it was conceived before Microsoft bought Activision and has nothing specifically to do with Xbox or the recent closure of multiple Bethesda studios.
The news hasn’t quite come out of the blue though, as Activision also posted a job ad for a director of animation engineering last week, working out California.
Although it provides no details of what the game is, it’s described as a ‘new IP’ and so is presumably related to the additional resources mentioned during the studio announcement.
Either that or Activision is planning to make two new franchises. Although that may be hoping for a bit too much.
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