Five veterans of Criterion Games decided to leave the studio in December following the launch of its latest game, Need for Speed Unbound, and while their future plans weren’t clear at the time, they certainly are now. As reported by GamesIndustry.biz, Matt Webster, Steve Uphill, Pete Lake, Andrei Shires, and Alan McDairmant have reunited to form Fuse Games, a new studio that describes itself as a world-glass game development studio that aims to create genre-leading, player-first AAA interactive entertainment. Webster, who serves as the studio’s general manager, declined to confirm whether his first project would be another racing game, but he says that one of the goals of the studio is to make games “quickly and healthily.”
From a GamesIndustry.biz report:
The new outfit has been founded by studio general manager Matt Webster, head of content Steve Uphill, head of production Pete Lake, head of technology Andrei Shires, and head of operations Alan McDairmant.
The team is in the process of finding an office in Guildford, and will adopt a hybrid working approach. Its first game will be a AAA console and PC release, and when asked if it’ll match the games Criterion is famous for – racing titles such as Burnout and Need for Speed – Webster isn’t giving anything away.
“Obviously arcade racers and open world racers are what we know very deeply. But we have played around in other genres over the years, including Battlefront, Battlefield… VR. We know what we are good at, and that spans a broad range of things now. Once we select our genre, we want to lead that genre.”
“We’ve been fortunate enough to work on games that have spanned the whole gamut,” Webster continues. “We know what it’s like to have a small group spinning up something new, to have multiple hundreds of people on a huge development. We will end up being somewhere in-between.”