DICE LA, one of the studios that most recently worked on EA’s upcoming tentpole game, Battlefield 2042, has announced it’s changing its name: It’s now Ripple Effect Studio. It’s also apparently working on a new game and is attempting to recruit new talent to help develop it, though it’s also working on a mode for the aforementioned Battlefield release.
The name change is apparently part of a company-wide rebranding that EA has been working on for quite some time. The name change effectively takes the company from being just a support studio for other titles to being a fully-fledged development studio that can develop other titles for the company. According to IGN’s report, “Ripple Effect” was a name chosen by popular internal vote.
Christian Grass, DICE LA-turned-Ripple Effect’s general manager, said the main impetus for the change is to attract new talent for an unannounced project: “We’re coming out with our new social media and media presence. We’re going to talk a lot more about who we are… So we’re looking for every type of craft and we are going to grow so that we increase our capacity and our capabilities to do more.” Vince Zampella, head of the studio and one of the founders of Respawn, is one of the ones who spearheaded the name and branding change and said in a statement that the studio was opening a new LA office and was offering remote working positions.
BF 2042 has been worked on by almost every studio that works under the EA umbrella, with each studio developing a part of the game. Ripple Effect’s contribution is that it developed one of the game’s modes, though we don’t know which one — we’ll probably find out more at the EA Play event later this month. Ripple Effect will likely move on to their unannounced project after its launch later this year, assuming it doesn’t help support the game post-launch.
Source: IGN
