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A group of former EA and Ubisoft staff members are opening a studio called Moon Rover Games in Stockholm, Sweden.
Moon Rover hopes to create immersive cooperative games set in never before seen worlds, with a focus on original intellectual properties and players sharing ‘their own unexpected gameplay moments and stories’ using system-driven design.
The current roster of talent on the Moon Rover Games team includes employees that have worked on huge names like Far Cry, Battlefield, Tom Clancy’s The Division, Mirror’s Edge and Crusader Kings, just to name a few.
“Our vision is to create engaging games set in immersive worlds that shape themselves around the players,” said Jamie Keen, creative director at Moon Rover Games. ” We are passionate about building system-driven games, story generators where unexpected things happen, enabling players to live their own personal stories within a world created for them.”
Moon Rover Games will endeavour to keep their studio medium-sized, so that every team member can hopefully feel their own impact, influence, and autonomy on projects. The leadership still believes that the team can create AAA-quality work if they leverage solutions like off-the-shelf game engines and AI to assist them, however.
“We are standing on the shoulders of giants, and grateful to have the opportunity to apply what we learned working on some of the world’s biggest games to building healthy foundations for a new company.” explained Julien Wera, CEO of Moon Rover Games. “Today’s tools combined with our team’s experience gives us the opportunity to build ambitious action games while maintaining a creative and people-driven culture where everyone can have impact and autonomy.”
“The power of today’s commercial game engines and development tools allows for massive acceleration of early prototyping and development which lets us find the fun in a very short time and then build large, ambitious games without the need for a hundred-person team,” added Moon Rover Games’ technical director Ben Keen.
“Moon Rover’s approach to technology is to focus on delivering great gameplay experiences first and foremost, and that is why we are using Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 5, but also developing our own tech only where it makes the most impact on the game.”
