People Can Fly, the development team behind Bulletstorm and Gears of War: Judgment, has announced that they are working on a new AAA shooter with Square Enix. The studio only mentioned that the project was a new IP and gave no other details in the long blog post that detailed their two new studios.
One of these studios is based in Newcastle, United Kingdom while the other is based in Rzeszow, Poland. The Rzeszow studio is only about 400 kilometers from the main People Can Fly studio in Warsaw, Poland. All 150 people in all three studios are working on this unnamed Square Enix shooter. No possible release window was given.
The Newcastle studio opened in September 2017 and is staffed with veteran game developers and former Ubisoft employees. The recently opened Rzeszow studio has about 30 developers and all have worked on the Sniper: Ghost Warrior series. Opening another Polish studio makes sense, given how the area is becoming a gaming hub partly due to the country’s excellent computing and physics courses. CD Projekt Red, developers of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, is also based in Poland.
People Can Fly was founded in 2004, purchased by Epic Games in 2012, and then regained its independence in 2015. They stated that this freedom has pushed them to build teams of talented people. When CI Games, developers of the Sniper: Ghost Warriors franchise, restructured earlier this year, People Can Fly saw this as a good opportunity to branch out their operation and help others. The CI Games team got to stay together and assist People Can Fly with their games.
However, this doesn’t mean they are both just extensions of the main studio. According to People Can Fly‘s CEO Sebastian Wojciechowski, both of these teams are meant to work with and independently from the Warsaw team. The blog post ends stating that all People Can Fly locations are hiring for a whole bunch of different positions.
