Stadia, which launched in November as a cloud gaming division of Google, has acquired Typhoon Studio, a triple-A game developer based in Montreal to drive creation of exclusive content for the Stadia platform.
According to Jade Raymond, Google Stadia vice president of Games & Entertainment, what was particularly impressing about Typhoon is its ability to put together its debut title Journey to the Savage Planet, with a team of 25 in under two years.
“We’re super-excited to be able to be working with this crew because they’re a team that has done amazing work on amazing games. They worked on everything from Batman to Assassin’s Creed. And the original Splinter Cell, which Reid led as executive producer.”
Jade Raymond, Stadia VP of Games & Entertainment
“It’s a small indie studio but built by industry veterans who shipped a lot of your favorite triple-A (games), ” said Jade Raymond. “They’re about to ship Journey to the Savage Planet, which is coming on January 28. It’s a game that they made with a team of 25 and under two years. They built up a studio and shipped something pretty amazing.”
Typhoon Studio was founded by Reid Schneider, former head of production for Warner Bros. Games Montreal, a senior producer of the original Splinter Cell and executive producer on Batman: Arkham Knight as well as other AAA titles, and Alex Hutchinson, the lead designer of Spore and The Sims 2, creative director of Assassin Creed III and Far Cry 4.
Stadia opens Games and Entertainment studio in Montreal, headed by Sébastien Puel, a Ubisoft veteran. The Typhoon team will become part of the Stadia Montreal.
Typhoon Studios will launching Journey to the Savage Planet for the consoles and PC on January 28 next year, 505 Games being the publisher, as an project independent of Google acquisition. Set in a science fiction universe, Journey to the Savage Planet is a two-player co-op game. A demo issued earlier this year features the planet with a colorful art style and bizarre creatures.
Alex Hutchinson noted that it will be exciting to access more technology and capital at Google to focus on much bigger, more ambitious future games of Stadia.
“One thing that’s really exciting to the team is the opportunities to build something really innovative and really new and focused on one awesome platform. The most exciting thing from my point of view is that, with the cloud, the new technology allows us to think at a bigger scale than we had before. The opportunity space is so much bigger. We’re excited to hit the ground with our team and work with Jade to figure out how far we can push it.”
Reid Schneider, Typhoon Games co-founder
Jade Raymond noted the initial team at Stadia will work on making the platform stand out from others. Besides more titles to appear, Stadia platform is expected to evolve towards integrating Google YouTube social video technology and functionality to let gamers join the streams of influencers and enter right ino a game.
Raimond said: “I think people are very excited as much as we are to get those features built into games. So we’re thinking about all of those features definitely as the core and we’re working pretty closely with YouTube gaming and the influencers that they have there to get input on those kinds of things that are going to be the most interesting and the most innovative. But it’s cool, now we’re launched and so it’s a live service. And, you know, we’re adding new features every week. And it’s nice to be out there and outside of the paper world with real players giving that feedback and being able to react to that.”
Google is on its way to make bigger investments to match other platform owners, such as Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony. Typhoon is the first acquisition for Stadia as Raymond forms the platform’s first-party offerings, and likely we will see others.
Don’t forget to share this post
