Don’t you hate it when a gaming company makes a certain announcement and then doesn’t mention anything about that announcement for years on end? Sadly, that’s something that’s been going on with the video game industry a lot in the past several years. They’ll announce a game or studio, and then nothing will come of it for years. They do the initial reveal to “drum up hype,” and then gamers will get frustrated when they don’t hear anything for a long time, and the devs just tell them to wait. For the Bioshock franchise, that’s been happening for over four years now.
If you recall, 2K made the surprise announcement four years back that the Bioshock franchise was going to continue and that they made a new team called “Cloud Chamber” to make it happen. All in all, it was a good reveal, as the franchise had two strong entries and some unique DLC that made it clear that the franchise had legs. However, since then, we’ve heard nothing. Not even a concept art tease or a rumor of what the titles for the next game would be! It’s been a long time, and now, the only “update” we have is via some LinkedIn postings!
According to the posting, 2K Cloud Chamber is getting a massive recruitment drive going, with over 30 jobs available for people to try and get. Typically, you wouldn’t do that big of a recruiting drive unless you were sure that something was going down and you needed the manpower to help push something through. Here’s a quote from the job listing:
“The BioShock team at 2K Cloud Chamber is ramping up! We have many positions open across a variety of disciplines, including art, animation, engineering, design, narrative, and production. We are working on a really awesome project, and our studio is remote-friendly.”
When you look at some of the positions they’re offering, you’ll notice that many are “Senior” positions, another piece of proof that this is a serious offer and that things might finally be ramping up for the franchise.
The only question now is, why are they only doing this now? If they need these high-level positions for its next game, why didn’t they have them before? Did they struggle to find a way to make the franchise continue? Did 2K have them work on other games before diving back into this series? We can’t say, and we also can’t say when we’ll hear a new announcement about the title they’re recruiting for.