Respawn Entertainment is opening a third studio to support the development of Apex Legends a few weeks after the parent company EA laid off more than 200 testers of the game.
The third Respawn studio will be located in Madison, Wisconsin, and will initially support the Apex Legends shooter in the battle royale genre.
As reported by GamesIndustry.biz, the studio will be headed by Ryan Burnett, who previously worked as the director of production of Epic Games engines, and before that he worked for Raven Software, the developer of Call Of Duty, for 14 years.
“Wisconsin is fast becoming a central development hub here,” Burnett said GamesIndustry.biz . “I’ve been working on FPS games here for a long time, so we think there’s a really good hotbed of talent here that we can benefit from.”
Stephen Ferreira, game director at Apex Legends, added that Respawn’s Wisconsin branch will offer more opportunities to experiment with the game.
“The creation of the Apex online service is a constant cycle of trying new things and experimenting, and this is what Wisconsin will give us – the opportunity to do more,” he shared.
However, the new Respawn studio came a few weeks after EA’s parent company laid off more than 200 Apex Legends testers in Baton Rouge.
Former employees told NME that they were fired because EA wanted a “more” globally diverse”testing team,” and their contracts were terminated through an emergency call to Zoom.
NME contacted EA to find out if Respawn’s new studio is related to the layoffs in Baton Rouge.
Looking ahead, Ferreira said Respawn views Apex “as a franchise that will exist for 10, 15 or more years, and we are glad that this will happen.”
In other gaming news, Paradox Interactive reported that its competitor The Sims, Life By You, is launching in early access this summer.
