Just over a week after Microsoft abruptly shuttered four studios—Arkane Austin, Tango Gameworks, Alpha Dog Games, and Roundhouse Games—Microsoft-owned Activision has announced the launch of a new internal studio called Elsewhere Entertainment, “exclusively focused on creating a new narrative-based and genre-defining AAA franchise.”
The new studio is based in Warsaw, Poland, and is made up of “storytelling experts” who have previously worked on games including The Last of Us, Uncharted, The Witcher, Cyberpunk, Destiny, Tom Clancy’s The Division, and Far Cry.
“The new studio has full access to Activision’s resources and tools as it continues to increase production and development,” Activision said. “Elsewhere is opening its search for best-in-class talent from across the industry and around the world to help create a state-of-the-art and next generation gaming experience.”
Elsewhere Entertainment is working on something entirely new—it’s not Call of Duty, which is a nice change of pace. And, as an Activision project, it’s unrelated to last week’s studio closures. Aside from the fact that Microsoft owns Activision, of course, which you have to imagine gives it some say in what Activision does when it comes to things like launching new studios or laying off employees.
Work on the new game has been underway for some time now, though—this is merely the first public mention of the new studio and whatever it’s got cooking—so in all fairness, it’s not a case of killing four studios and then immediately setting up another one amongst their rubble.
If anything, it looks mainly to be a simple matter of crappy timing, which I would say reflects a rather ugly indifference to the human cost borne by a year and a half of brutal cuts and closures in pursuit of a marginally better bottom line. I’ve never cared too much about optics but even I have to say that, hey, the optics here ain’t great.
There’s no word on when Elsewhere’s debut project will be revealed, but the studio is ramping up hiring to get things going in earnest.