Historically known for its work on the Forza Horizon saga, but also for its role in the development of the next Fable, the Playground Games studio has just made a surprising announcement to say the least. One thing is certain, things are happening within Xbox Game Studios and the Redmond company intends to raise the bar in 2023.
The British Playground Games founded Maverick Games
Already a subsidiary of Xbox, Playground Games has just announced the creation of a brand new AAA studio named Maverick Games. The latter will also be based in England, in Leamington Spa, and it is Mike Brown, former creative director of Forza Horizon, who becomes the creative director and head of Maverick Games.
For the rest of the team, we find Harinder Sangha, the director of operations formerly co-director at Sumo Digital Leamington, but also Tom Butcher who becomes executive producer and who was main producer at Playground Games. Matt Craven becomes CTO after serving as CTO at Playground. Gareth Harwood becomes Content Director after serving as Technical Art Director for Playground. Finally, Fraser Strachan retains his status as audio director by moving to Maverick, Ben Penrose retains his position as artistic director he had at Playground and Elly Marshall becomes UX / UI director for Maverick after having been director of experience design at EA.
Suffice to say that this is a well-experienced team that has received significant funding to get started properly and work on a first AAA project in the open world. With only 10 employees at the moment, Maverick Games hopes to have 140 in its ranks soon. Mike Brown spoke in detail in an article from our colleagues at Gamesindustry.biz and said in particular:
“Our goal is to make Maverick Games a studio that people will love. For gamers, we’re already hard at work on an exciting, ultra-high quality title, and for developers, we’re building a home where everyone is encouraged to take risks, be curious, be creative, be innovative, to be himself, and above all – to be a Maverick. »
After releasing Forza Horizon 5 in November 2021, Playground Games is still expected to turn with its second DLC as well as for the return of Fable, but the studio seems to have other ideas for the future with the creation of this new subsidiary.
