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Respawn Entertainment has branched out into a new studio set up in Vancouver, Canada, to support the development of Apex Legends (via GamesIndustry.biz).
This studio is located within the Vancouver campus for Electronic Arts, which is the publisher of Apex Legends, and it will be led by Steven Ferreira, who was the design director for Sleeping Dogs developer United Front Games. “When you look at Vancouver, it’s one of our [EA’s] biggest studio locations,” said Henry Lee, head of operations, in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz. “And Vancouver is full of talented people in the games industry, so there was a natural fit with Steven coming on board with his core team and really establishing that foundation. Now we’re just adding the missing pieces to it.”
“This is a great opportunity, not just for the Vancouver studio to bring some new creative challenges to people already there, but also to the local industry in terms of being part of the Apex Legends roadmap,” continued Lee. “So we’re very excited about bringing this to Vancouver and hopefully greater Canada as well, because we can tap into much more of a talent base broadly.” The studio hopes to recruit approximately 80 people, though the majority of the present hires were sought out internally.
The new Vancouver studio will also act to lessen the pressure placed on the original California studio, and adopt a moderate approach to the future of Apex Legends. “You invest in the people you’re working with, and as long as you can carve out that time and not get sucked into the day-to-day live service, the innovations will happen,” qualified game director Chad Grenier. “At Respawn we’ve already got a lot of innovations underway… The trouble is we can’t do all the innovations we want—there are just too many. How do you choose which ones to run with, and which ones are best for the game? And building a team in Vancouver is only going to help us bring more to the game.”
Apex Legends is out now for PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4.
