Media Molecule, one of the teams in the first party, PlayStation Studios family that continues to intrigue us with their direction, is throwing another curveball out there with it being revealed, via the team’s official website that they’re hiring for a number of roles that connect to a new, unannounced game. The incredible observant eyes of Eugene Schaffmeir at Lordsofgaming.net, spotted the listing on the Media Molecule website that highlighted several new roles that the team was looking for that were for a new game, as opposed to many other listings that connect to their current, ongoing project, Dreams.
There were several roles of note:
Development Director
As development director of our pioneering and expanding game studio, you will be responsible for ensuring that our engineering teams are set up most effectively to successfully deliver on our product objectives. Working alongside Production and Tech leadership you will help to define best-in-class professional practices by setting organisational and delivery standards across the studio.
You are an excellent people manager with proven experience as an accomplished engineer on live games across multiple platforms. You have experience and understanding of both the technical and organisational challenges involved in scaling technology solutions and teams for a game studio undergoing expansion.
- Ensure suitable management and professional support for our engineers to consistently strive for higher levels of excellence.
- Work with technical leadership roles to understand organisational pain points and identify strategies for addressing them.
- Communicate technical matters to internal and external stakeholders to align on and support decisions.
- Line/matrix-manage engineers and engineering leads.
- Work closely with HR to deliver effective talent planning across the engineering team.
- Partner with colleagues in production craft to help remove impediments for technical delivery and identify iterative improvements to workflow.
- You will collaborate and advise on project planning, staffing plans, and workflows that are needed to deliver the product and guide transformational change in the studio.
- Identify and help manage partnering opportunities for development efforts, both internally and externally.
Live Health Product Owner
It’s an exciting time to join the team here at Media Molecule as we continue to push the boundaries of creative gaming! We are now looking for an organised, proactive and collaborative Live Health Product Owner – In this fast paced role, you will have line management responsibility for a small customer support team and will partner closely with the live analytics and user testing teams.
- Link live health, analytics and player experience to action across multiple studio teams.
- Keeping departments and stakeholders informed of the state of the live game and any critical or time sensitive issues.
- Manage customer support, tracking topics of conversation and making sure customer support representatives have up-to-date messaging and information.
- Develop and maintain the live health roadmap, prioritising and tracking key issues through to resolution.
- Proactively champion user experience, including accessibility issues and collaborate with user testing to ensure the team is aware and addressing usability issues that impact the live game.
- Work closely with the analytics team to highlight and communicate live game data to the appropriate teams and collate follow-through actions.
- Manage and update the KPI release tracker, working with analytics to set benchmarks for live health data.
- Deliver a weekly overview of live health, including sentiment survey results (when applicable), risks and context on the current product.
- Work with user testing to deliver in-game surveys and collect information from players.
- Organize (currently monthly) reports and meetings, ensuring pertinent data is delivered to key stakeholders & teams.
There were several other roles that also connected to this unknown title. Though it is unsurprising that Media Molecule is working on a live-service game, especially considering their previous works, LittleBigPlanet 1+2, and Dreams, this development is notable because it firstly highlights that a pivot towards a new project is occurring, but also because Jim Ryan commented that PlayStation intended to launch 10 live-service games by 2026, and this new Media Molecule title could be one of those.
