Just seen the bio. That guy's a member of the BGST podcast of Crapgamer fame.
It's a monumental reach. Can be discounted.
-
Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
Playground Games to Expand to 400 Devs, Possible Third New IP Studio?
- Thread starter Rychu
- Start date
It's a monumental reach. Can be discounted.
How long are they this big? Even if some part of studio is working on an engine.. this is just ridiculous number of devs and staff for making like 2 big games in 5-6years.
And how big is infinite gonna be? Like 50 hours of singleplayer, with coop, raids and big multiplayer?
Jesus, its just.. 550?:D
Playground Games has never missed a deadline, has exceptional polish, amazing optimization and releases Forza Horizon game every two years with a team of 100+ and every game being more critically acclaimed than the previous game.
Fable is going to be worked on with 200+ devs and I expect it will take 3 years to make.
It is doable if not all projects are releasing at the same time. The scope is also important. We for example were working on Battlefield, Battlefront, and Mirror's Edge at the same time with similar head count.
The Coalition now have multiple projects in dev yet they are smaller studio. Again, scope matters. :)
No disrespect to them. Quality racing games on a frequent basis don't really happen anymore outside the Forza series.
But a racing game is not an open world RPG. Roughly 200~ developers but only three years? That's something CDPR can't do. Bethesda can't do it, that's why they staffed way up. Guerilla Games couldn't do it. The only people who've even churned games out in that short a time span are Ubisoft, and they use absurd numbers of people to help them develop their games. Are you saying they'll do a bunch of outsourcing?
343 being that big and only working on one game is insane!!!! I love myself some Halo but once Infinity is out, they should be able to work on 2 games while a small team continues to create content for Infinity. One massive team of 500 employees working on one game baffles me.
The Coalition makes sense as a 300 ish employee team. That's enough to make a triple A game and have a think group coming up with ideas and working on the next thing.
If playgrounds is truly expanding to 400+ that's massive. Probably 2 main groups and a brainstorming group. 400+ is a lot of employees but not enough to work on 3 big major projects when resources and assets are so expensive and time consuming.
Forza Horizon 4 LOOKS AMAZING, which brings me to what that specific team should work on next. Can't over saturate the market with Forza's. Let that team breathe and work on something else while a small think group ponders ideas for a 5th installment in 6 years!
The Coalition makes sense as a 300 ish employee team. That's enough to make a triple A game and have a think group coming up with ideas and working on the next thing.
If playgrounds is truly expanding to 400+ that's massive. Probably 2 main groups and a brainstorming group. 400+ is a lot of employees but not enough to work on 3 big major projects when resources and assets are so expensive and time consuming.
Forza Horizon 4 LOOKS AMAZING, which brings me to what that specific team should work on next. Can't over saturate the market with Forza's. Let that team breathe and work on something else while a small think group ponders ideas for a 5th installment in 6 years!
They have a lot more than 500 employees.
https://www.pressreader.com/australia/edge/20161110/282677571850633
According to this interview, they had 450 developers working on Halo 5 content and the next Halo game in 2016. They've grown since two years.
Also there's an interview from June (E3) where 343 Industries says majority of their devs are working on Halo Infinite as well as a support studio (Skybox Studios), total of 550+ devs on Halo Infinite.
I was wondering when someone was gonna post this lol. The dude that twitted this said the job listings aren't his only source he's basing it off of something else, so he's got some evidence of this third studio but I don't know how reliable he is.
Playground is quite literally maybe the best managed studio in the entire industry. Zero hyperbole
You are talking about a studio that has put out 3 open world games this generation, all in different settings / locations. 2 of those games are over 90 Metacritic. The team in charge of running that studio are outstanding at their jobs.
I have no trepidation at all about their expansion
You are talking about a studio that has put out 3 open world games this generation, all in different settings / locations. 2 of those games are over 90 Metacritic. The team in charge of running that studio are outstanding at their jobs.
I have no trepidation at all about their expansion
Didn't know those were incubation projects. Either way, I think it's a good thing. Just trying to make the point that I don't believe there will be 3 even teams trying to create AAA games at the same time.
Before we knew about any of this, we knew they were building a second team to work on an open world game and that second team is in a separate studio, they are pretty much two studios right there, the horizon team will keep working on horizon and they're building the other team in a separate building, so it's safe to assume horizon and that game will be developed alongside each other by different teams, this supposed third team though is new news, so we don't know much about them.
T10 is also pretty small and we had multiple projects in production as well as assisting Playground Games. an entire sub team was dedicated to Playground. Don't forget things like Forza app,website which also have to be managed. There is also lots of outsourcing as well which has to be managed.
NICE. Playground is arguably Microsoft's best internal studio. Can't wait to see what they do with Fable and a third studio which will be a new IP??? Hell yeah!!!
I see. Thats really interesting, I could see them more or less working on prototypes, concepts and just getting the game of the ground in general, while staff starts getting freed up from other projects. Kinda like how Guerrilla worked on Horizon while KZ:SF was still in development.
I assume it's a satellite studio to grab talent from other areas of the UK, helping on the Fable project. You have to remember that both teams, the Horizon and Fable team are suppose to grow to two hundred. This is obviously for next gen, it's going to take more people and more time. It should also be pointed out that Playground had over 175 employees back in September 2017, so no missing 100. 200 hires for Fable, plus growing the Horizon team up to 200 for next gen. There is no reason currently to believe that Playground intends to have a third standalone studio, or to set up a third project. It seems the twitter post you have in the OP is just guessing that a third building must mean a third studio, somehow grabbing a new IP out of thin air.
I mean they do do other stuff. They worked on MCC fixes, still have a small team working on Halo 5 and MCC tuning, slip space engine, helped with halo wars 2, and Halo 6 is going to have an Xbox and pc version that has a single player and a robust multiplayer
Three locations does not equate to three teams, we have plenty of examples in the industry of studios having multiple studio locations to work on a single game.
These guys ship the best racing games in the world in every two years and are presumably rebooting a staple open-world RPG franchise and need to staff up quickly. Having more available working locations means a bigger pool of talent available to choose from, you can get a better variety of talent and recruit more quickly, that's likely the reason. For today's standards, 400 people for two AAA projects is almost the floor amount of staff you need, so I personally don't see this indicating a third game being worked on.
These guys ship the best racing games in the world in every two years and are presumably rebooting a staple open-world RPG franchise and need to staff up quickly. Having more available working locations means a bigger pool of talent available to choose from, you can get a better variety of talent and recruit more quickly, that's likely the reason. For today's standards, 400 people for two AAA projects is almost the floor amount of staff you need, so I personally don't see this indicating a third game being worked on.
Jesus. Either it was a troubled production or is going to be ambitious as hell. Or both!
What's up with ERA and duplicate threads of old news today?
https://www.resetera.com/threads/pl...udio-has-posted-over-150-new-positions.70227/
https://www.resetera.com/threads/pl...udio-has-posted-over-150-new-positions.70227/
Signs point to an open world Halo. Pie in the sky prediction is a full Halo ring being explorable, which would be the coolest thing ever.
Either way, the amount of time since Halo 5, plus the creation of the Slip Space engine points to an incredibly ambitious game. This ain't Halo 5.5
If you share assets and tech then I'm sure it's possible.
Communication between the studios would then be vital.
Would you be able to name one studio that has managed to do this?
I'm not sure I follow. Turn 10 is involved in 2 games at most, the Horizon and Motorsport games they work on concurrently. The question was about a hypothetical 3 AAA games being made at the same time by one studio. The 3rd game for Playground is pure speculation at this point. So, those don't actually count for the aforementioned reasons.
Their portfolio doesn't lie: at least as far as racing and technical aspects go, they are one of the most talented developers out there, definitely top 3 at least. Even if they stick to racing forever (which they aren't) means these guys will lead the genre for long, providing incredible quality experiences. I'm cautiously optimistic about them branching towards other genres, there's definitely studios only really familiar with one genre ending up doing excellent things in another (Criterion and Guerilla pop to mind). They definitely deserve to grow, I mean they've done 4 of the best racing games ever in 4 tries.
They are one of the best in the business, and make the best racing games of all time. They deserve to expand. I look forward to more from them.
As long as Microsoft is willing to support them financially and quality doesn't suffer there is not much that could go wrong.
Makes sense. Outstanding work on FH4.
I'd love a modern day RPG with the driving but being able to get out the car and explore and do missions etc.
I'd love a modern day RPG with the driving but being able to get out the car and explore and do missions etc.
The area being the... UK? Yeah, there's likely 400 people with enough talent.
I think anything is possible, but it would more likely be more devs for the 2nd studio, and not a third. I dont know much about this stuff, but I would think an open world RPG takes a lot of devs, and could end up putting them over 300.
Personally, i think its an interesting topic that they are hiring so many people so we can speculate, but not a fan of saying its three studios without any proof. I would have probably went with another title.
Personally, i think its an interesting topic that they are hiring so many people so we can speculate, but not a fan of saying its three studios without any proof. I would have probably went with another title.
That's a good answer. I forgot about Mirrors Edge being worked on along with their usually released titles.
Getting dat gamepass money I guess.
Monthly aaa game release please.
I think a Fast & Furious inspired action adventure driving game would be up Playground Games alley.