Respawn Entertainment veteran Stig Asmussen has announced the formation of Giant Skull, a new triple-A studio based in LA that was founded to develop the next generation of “gameplay-driven, story-immersed” action-adventure games. Giant Skull is currently working on a single-player-focused action-adventure title, one that is being built in Unreal Engine 5.
Asmussen’s credits include:
- Star Wars Jedi: Survivor (Director)
- Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order (Director)
- God of War: Ascension (Artist)
- Mortal Kombat (Director)
- God of War III (Director, Writer)
- God of War: Chains of Olympus (Artist)
- God of War II (Artist)
- God of War (Artist)
Asmussen told GamesIndustry.biz in a new interview about his new venture:
- “I don’t think you need a couple of hundred people to make a AAA game. I don’t know how big we’re going to get, but, especially being able to call our own shots, I think we can make a very successful competitive game with 100 people.”
- “AAA can sometimes mean AAA dollars…but a lot of that depends on how you ramp up your headcount, and how quickly the expectations are that you ship the game. And that can make the game more expensive if you’ve got a lot of people on a long timeline.”
- “EA was a very supportive company. But this opportunity presented itself, and…there was this itch that as soon as I started thinking about it, I just couldn’t shake.”
- “…from day one, it was very important for me, and for this studio, that we’re truly independent, and we have the creative freedom that we need to be our best.”
- “We are single player-focused. That being said, it is early days and we are always looking for opportunities to engage players in different ways.”
Some of Giant Skull’s talent, per Game Informer:
…developers at Giant Skull include chief technology officer Jon Carr, who was the technical director on Jedi Survivor, art director Patrick Murphy, whose resume includes art director on Fortnite and Valorant, lead producer Lauren McLemore, who was a lead producer on Fortnite, and designer director Jeff Magers, who previously handled design on Jedi Survivor and Fallen Order. Giant Skull’s animation director is Brian Campbell, who was a founding member of the Fortnite team at Epic Games and then an animation director there, and the studio’s chief operating and financial officer is Anthony Scott, who has experience running teams such as Rocksteady Studios.
Discussion (6 replies)
Join Discussion →So wait they won't be doing the next in the Jedi series? That's still Respawn? Interesting.
I hope the best for him and sounds like he has some good ideas for being efficient. At a glance it looks like he has some good people at the top but hopefully he can follow through with similar quality staffing for the other roles because you can't really sail a ship with just a bunch of experienced captains and their lieutenants. His strategy of having just 100 people to make AAA games w/o long term timelines will ultimately depend on good staffing to get quality work done on time and not just leadership to point the direction.
Still Respawn and yeah, it'll be interesting.
Every other week you can read about a new studio with some old timers, my main issue is they never seem to get any games done afaik, or maybe they are not worth mentioning?
I totally agree. I can't even begin to keep track of all the new studios we've heard about in the last 2-3 years and yep, where are the games? I wonder if all the would-be talent is too busy trying to make it on their own with indie mobile games instead of taking a chance at one of these studios.
I don't know how they are doing it. A AAA game studio is going to take 3-5 years to create their first game on the conservative side. We've seen fairly large games done in less time but there are a ton of problems that come with that. It takes an enormous amount of resources and they'll effectively spend the next six months to a year finishing it.
It takes a lot of capital to even get a company of 100 people (mentioned in the article) hired and pay them for the time it takes to develop a AAA game. Not to mention all the other support stuff that goes along with it. Infrastructure, workstations, IT personnel etc.