A new AAA game studio has just been announced called “Maverick Games,” and it’s made up of developers from Playground Games, the game developer behind the Forza Horizon franchise. Notably, it’s being led by Mike Brown, who was the creative director of the Forza franchise prior to his departure.

A recent feature on GamesIndustry goes deeper into the creation of this new studio, which also involves other developers from Playground Games. Harinder Sangha, the developer’s COO, worked as interim studio head for SEGA HARDlight and operations director for Sumo Digital. There’s also Tom Butcher, the current executive producer at Maverick Games, who worked as Lead Producer at Playground Games. With other industry veterans also part of Maverick, it’s safe to say that the team’s quite stacked.

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Despite the experience of the company’s current members, however, Maverick Games is still quite small. With only ten employees, that’s not as much manpower or talent as what you’d expect from a AAA developer. The studio does plan on growing, however, with a goal of 140 employees.

For the studio’s debut game, the plan is to create an open-world title that’ll be available on consoles and PC. It’ll be a premium game, too, so no free-to-play shenanigans, either. It’s obviously still nowhere near completion, but at least we know the studio already has a goal in mind.

The Maverick Games office will be set up over at Leamington Spa in the UK, but according to Brown, the studio will adopt a more “modern approach” to work with remote and hybrid working options available.

More and more game studios like this one are popping up all over the world, and hopefully, we’ll get to hear news regarding Maverick’s debut game sometime in the future.

Source: GamesIndustry