Housemarque, the developers behind smaller arcade shooters such as Resogun, last year’s Nex Machina and Materfall, and the upcoming battle royale shooter Stormdivers, have announced that they are working on a new AAA project. Housemarque’s CEO and founder Ilari Kuittinen announced the news via a blog post late last week. In the blog post, Kuittinen announced that the Finnish studio has scaled to upwards of seventy employees to make “the jump to AAA development.” Kuittinen also declared that this new unannounced IP is “the biggest and most ambitious game that Housemarque has ever worked on.”
The move to AAA development comes a little over a year after the studio announced “Arcade is Dead” for the studio due to the poor sales of Nex Machina and Matterfall. Due to the poor commercial success of those titles, Kuittinen stated the the studio was faced with either significantly downsizing or taking on more ambitious projects. Opting to pursue the latter, the studio will now be working on Stormdivers and this new AAA project simultaneously.
In regards to the challenges of moving to AAA development, Kuittinen stated:
We had some challenges to face there as well. It took time to convince ourselves that we could be up to the task of developing a much bigger game than we have done in the past, as we were only around 50-people strong, working on two projects simultaneously.
Thus, the studio rethought their entire culture to accommodate AAA game development. Housemarque decided to “take the plunge” and created “new more ambitious concepts” to move up from the smaller titles they have always been known for. After creating these new concepts, the studio found a new partner to work with and started pre-production for the game last year. Going into 2019, Housemarque will continue to update fans ab0ut their upcoming projects.