Former Apex Legends developer who left the studio of Respawn Entertainment back in February, have now announced their own AAA studio called Gravity Well. Drew McCoy and Jon Shiring, who both left the studio earlier in the year left Respawn Entertainment to start their own studio.
Gravity Well is a new studio that will develop triple A titles but will be a workforce consisting of a small team of 80-85 people. John Shiring has said that the goal of the studio is to explore bold new ideas for next-gen hardware and PCs. That is a pretty good way to start and focus on the next-generation of consoles which is just around the corner.
The announcement was made by Drew McCoy over at his official twitter account.
I am beyond excited to announce Gravity Well – a new AAA studio @jonshiring and I are starting in Los Angeles! Its still early days, but if helping start a diverse and remote-native studio sounds interesting you should submit your resume at https://t.co/7mNxGk0XZE
— Drew McCoy (@DKo5) May 11, 2020
Gravity Well has also stated that the studio will start remotely from the start due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The studio is looking to hire the best talent in the industry, regardless of where the developers live. Currently, the Gravity Well website states that there are 12 positions open, where 8 are in development and 3 are in the studio department. There are also other positions that are not listed at the moment, but the studio is open for suggestions on what positions they can have.
We are starting a studio because of how we want to make games. We want time to iterate on everything and get ideas and feedback from the whole team. We’re building this studio to last for decades, and that doesn’t happen without putting the team first. We take team health as an absolute top priority. That means we are anti-crunch. That means good compensation. That means everyone at Gravity Well has creative freedom, because when someone else makes all of the decisions, work isn’t fun and the end product isn’t as good.
On the other hand, Jon Shiring aka Slothy, talked about the small size of the team, saying that everything.
Ask around, and you’ll get the same answer from devs – once your team size crosses 100 people, everything changes. It’s nobody’s fault – big organizations just move slowly. You need meetings just to make decisions. Choices get siloed and brilliant creatives become less creative. So let’s just not do that. We’re going to build a team that is 80-85 people at peak. We aren’t satisfied with the low level of creative risk that gets project funding these days. We want to explore bold new ideas exclusively for next-gen hardware and PCs.
It is too early for Gravity Well to even begin sharing their ideas and what titles they are looking to develop. It might take a year or two to get up to speed with the next generation of games and their development. It will be interesting to see what the developers can create, having known that they have worked on titles like Modern Warfare 2, Titanfall series, and Apex Legends.
What do you think of Gravity Well as the new studio formed by the former developers of Respawn Entertainment? Post your comments below.
