Ready at Dawn wanted to retain ownership of The Order IP; eyes up multiplatform future

The Order: 1886 developer Ready at Dawn has brought former Blizzard COO Paul Sams on board as CEO in a plan which aims to see the Californian studio retain ownership of its own IPs.

Co-founder and current CEO Ru Weerasuriya will become chief creative officer.

“Paul’s expertise will be essential in achieving some of our goals, including our desire to seek a strategic partner in helping us create and retain ownership of our own transmedia IPs,” commented Weerasuriya.

Ready at Dawn is now best known for its gorgeous-but-lacking PS4 exclusive The Order: 1886, a franchise Sams and Weerasuriya say the studio would have loved to retain ownership of.

“It was absolutely the company’s desire to own it,” Sams told GamesIndustry. “We love that game and we are proud of it. Unfortunately, we were at a point in the company’s evolution where owning that IP was not possible. We hope to not find ourselves in that position again.”

Weerasuriya added: “We knew going in that it was one of the conditions of partnering with Sony, so in that sense, there is no regret. With the amount of work we placed in creating The Order as an IP, our initial desire was definitely to retain ownership. But at the time, we also knew that it would take a partner to place focus and effort into all the ancillary work beyond the game itself.”

All that said, Ready at Dawn remains keen to work on the franchise, even though it would remain in Sony’s hands.

“We feel that The Order showcased the fruits of our labour on technology. That was one of the biggest focuses for the team having come from PSP and jumping directly to PS4. The first game was more than anything a launch platform to build upon. And as I mentioned in the past, The Order was never written as a one-off story,” said Weerasuriya. “There is a lot more to tell as you can see from the way the game ends. We of course have aspirations for the future of the IP and our involvement in its growth.”

Sams added: “We would love to be part of building The Order as a franchise. It is an IP that we created, that we deeply love and that we believe in. We cannot say more than that regarding The Order at this time.”

Besides The Order, Sams explained how the studio is now set up to create and own IP across multiple platforms – including a secret unannounced platform.

“Our technology now supports multiplatform development,” he said. Since the release of The Order, we have been very hard at work to advance our engine and technology to a place where we can deliver our games on PC, Xbox One, PS4 and one other unannounced platform that you will soon find out about.”

He added: “We want to build, own and publish our own IPs in the future. We are in the process of trying to figure out how we will be able to achieve that goal.”

Source: GamesIndustry