Activision Studio Elsewhere Has Been Making A Game For Two Years Now, With Witcher 3’s Gameplay Designer

We have some interesting new information about the recently announced new Activision studio, Elsewhere Entertainment.

As tweeted out by IdleSloth, AKA Alan Feely, LinkedIn profiles of several Elsewhere employees revealed that the studio has been making a game for two years now. The company may have as many as ten employees, as listed on LinkedIn, and one of them happens to be Andrzej Kwiatkowski.

And who is Andrzej Kwiatkowski, you might ask? He happens to be the former gameplay designer at CD Projekt RED. He worked on The Witcher III and Cyberpunk 2077, before leaving for Activision in 2022.

Andrzej’s LinkedIn profile also reveals that he still stayed in his native Poland when he left CD Projekt RED for Activision. That means Activision had established a presence in Poland, and built a studio there, for around two years now.

When we had reported on the announcement of this studio, Activision stated that they are working on a “new narrative-based and genre-defining AAA franchise”. OK, but it turns out we found out more about this much earlier.

We also reported on a job listing from Activision, that revealed they were working on a new game. We did confirm that this is the same game that Elsewhere is working on. That opening for an animation engineering director was available for two locations: in Santa Monica, California, USA, and Warsaw, Poland.

Of course, video game development can partly be done remotely, so Activision could have an arrangement for their Polish and US studios to be working with each other.  That this is a new job opening also helps us in building a bigger picture of this project.

Between when Activision started working with their unnamed Polish studio in 2022, to when they got their official name, they were likely prototyping and making a project pitch, perhaps showing Activision how they would implement a game idea, and Activision just approved their pitch very recently.

So now they’re moving forward with this new game idea, and ramping up properly to get it made. While we don’t know what the game is yet, we can already say that Microsoft is its immediate beneficiary.

Whether this game makes its way to rival platforms or becomes Xbox exclusive, Microsoft gets the leverage, and they have a new game to tout to fans and investors. They didn’t have to pay for the preliminary phase, but now they are going to have to commit to getting this game made.

It also means we probably won’t see this game for a while. It may not even resurface until sometime around 2029, but hopefully it’s something that will be worth that wait.