News release (Monday - 12.09.2016)
All the main business news and development of the gaming industry for the day in one publication.
1. The chief designer of World of Warcraft founded his own studio and raised $25 million
The most important headline of the industrial press today.
Rob Padro (Rob Pardo), who worked for 16 years at Blizzard, launched his own studio Bonfire Studios. Together with him in the team are former employees of Blizzard, Nexon and Ubisoft. The studio will most likely create an MMO project, but it is not known which one and for which platform. Bonfire Studios has already raised $25 million to develop the project. One of the venture “angels” was Riot Games.
That is, the money was given specifically for the team. It is unclear what share the authors of League of Legends have in the new company based on the results of the transaction. It is also unclear whether this is the initiative of Riot itself or whether Tencent, which owns 100% of the company, decided to act through it.
2. The investment company acquired a stake in the developer of Dead Island 2 and LittleBigPlanet 3
Another news about investments. This time without specific numbers.
An unspecified stake in the British company Sumo Digital, slowly moving from the creation of ports and sequels to the development of original titles, was acquired by the investment firm Perwyn PW.
You’ve hardly heard of Sumo Digital as such, but it has a solid portfolio. The company was engaged in LittleBigPlanet 3, Forza Horizon 2, Moshi Monsters, Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing, and is now working on Dead Island 2, Crackdown 3 and its own puzzle Snake Pass.
Last week, the indie game Submerged: Miku and the Sunken City, a port of the project of the same name from the PC, was released on iOS. Its developers, who created the game on Unreal 4, claim that they would not have been able to port the game if not for the Simplygon tool, which allowed, for example, to reduce the number of meshes from 4176 to 30 LOD meshes, and the number of polygons from 1.38 million to 183 thousand. According to them, thanks to the tool, they were able to maintain high quality graphics.
But the players disagree with the developers. They say that the graphics have nothing to do with the screenshots of the game in the App Store, and the project has performance problems even on the iPad Pro, as well as management problems.
Note that the project was originally conceived as a multiplatform.
4. The founder of Infinity Ward and Respawn Entertainment makes a clone of Hearthstone
Today it finally became clear what exactly the mobile startup of Vince Zampella, co-founder of Infinity Ward (Call of Duty) and Respawn Entertainment (Titanfall) is working on. His mobile studio Particle City (formerly Nuclear Division) – with the support of Nexon and Respawn – is working on Titanfall: Frontline, a Hearthstone clone in the world of Titanfall (at least, the first screenshots make exactly this impression).
The project is promised to be released in the App Store and Google Play this fall. And we, in turn, note that we do not remember such a literal quotation of the Blizzard card game.
