Remember Cave Johnson’s lemon rant? Seems the former staff of Visceral Games’ Melbourne studio took his advice – except instead of burning someone’s house down, they’ve opened their own studio.
When EA shut down Visceral Melbourne in September this year, developer Gerry Sakkas was forced to choose between either going to America to keep working with EA, or stay in Melbourne and find something else. Sakkas wasn’t having any of that moving business, so he stayed in Melbourne and founded PlaySide studios with the help of some of his former EA Visceral colleagues, Aaron Pasias and Mark Goulopoulos.
PlaySide will focus mainly on mobile development, and will officially open shop January 16. "We believe our studio has something really special in the sense that we can create quality assets, characters, design, and stories for any platform," Sakkas said in a press statement.
"Some of the larger studios have simply taken their hit titles and slapped them onto a mobile platform–this is not what mobile consumers want and it is the complete opposite of what we are setting out to do. We are all about making a completely tailored experience for the mobile platform, with the added quality and polish of a console game. Our biggest goals are to create unique and loveable characters and to make a real impact on the mobile games industry."
PlaySide hopes to make a new game announcement sometime in March 2012. This is fantastic news for the Australian games industry, which has been seeing a lot of studio closures recently.
If you’re a Melbourne based games dev looking for work, or if you just want to show these guys a little support, you can find them on Facebook.
[Source: Gamespot AU]
