Just last week, NetEase announced the formation of T-Minus Zero Entertainment, a new AAA gaming studio led by former SWTOR (Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic) producer Rich Vogel, with their first title being an online third-person shooter of sorts. The team also confirmed that it would be an “original” IP, which according to some new details, just so happens to be based on an existing IP currently in the public domain. 

Speaking to Mp1st during gamescom 2023, T-Minus Zero Entertainment’s studio head, Rich Vogel, confirmed a few things about their upcoming online shooter, including that it would be session-based, as well as being recognizable as it’s based on a public domain property. 

So we’re working on a third-person shooter. It’s going to be an online game. It’s going to be session-based. We’d like to get people to enjoy themselves, even for a few minutes, and then they can continue playing if they want to, or they can come back another day to play. We will have assistance with the game, and there are reasons. We are working on IP I’d say that’s a public domain, but we can’t talk about it. It’s something that’s globally recognized, and when we do it, and people see it, they’ll understand it, but we’re going to make it our own, we’re going to actually make it our own. So we have a lot of leeway to do so, a we want to build, epic, immersive worlds that form vibrant communities. Basically, for lasting relationships in online games. So that’s my passion. That’s the team’s passion. And we have a really good critical team of very senior people we’re working with, with lots of experience.

We humored Rich with a few of our guesses, including Winnie the Pooh, though the team was very tight-lips, and for good reason.

Now, we’re not announcing what we’re doing exactly, because I’ll tell you why. Because as that journey happens, it’s going to take a lot of course corrections along the way. What we talked about today may not be what we ended up with.

So we like to keep it quiet, and so we have what we call a vertical slice, and then we show it off. It’s that point, we call it find the soul of the game. We know what we’re building, we have a build, and that’s when we’re going to ramp up our team. Really small and tight, we have about almost ten, but we’re gonna go to about thirty-five-ish, but there’s no pressure on us. The key to today’s wants is to make sure we build a player experience where players will come back to play all the time.

Hopefully it won’t be long before we see their project, though we’d wager it won’t be anytime this year. 

If you’d had to guess yourself, what public domain IP do you think they could possibly be basing their IP on? It could be anything, from a movie, TV show, to books, and comics. Let us know!