Former Respawn Entertainment Developer’s Open New Studio, Gravity Well

Amid the ongoing tensions that continue to strangle individuals during this plaguing pandemic, some individuals have found new opportunity instead despite the hardened efforts during these trying times. Coming from Drew McCoy and Jon Shiring, the two former Respawn Entertainment employees open a new studio.

Announcing Gravity Well, this new developer shares to be a new card in the deck of big budget, AAA studios. “We’ve been making games together for a long time and have learned a ton about ways to lead teams and ship games,” McCoy shares on the ambitions of the newly-founded team. “We believe the time is right to shake things up in AAA game dev.”

We are starting a studio because of how we want to make games. We want time to iterate on everything and get ideas and feedback from the whole team. We’re building this studio to last for decades, and that doesn’t happen without putting the team first.

We take team health as an absolute top priority. That means we are anti-crunch. That means good compensation. That means everyone at Gravity Well has creative freedom, because when someone else makes all of the decisions, work isn’t fun and the end product isn’t as good.

Behind the experience from McCoy and Shiring, the two have built a foundation with the first-person shooter genre following their investment in Call of Duty 4: Modern, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Titanfall, Titanfall 2, and Apex Legends. Now after yet another console generation under their footing, the two want to expand on creating a flexible and communicative team in the AAA industry.

“Once your team size crosses 100 people, everything changes. It’s nobody’s fault – big organizations just move slowly. You need meetings just to make decisions,” Shiring explains. “Choices get siloed and brilliant creatives become less creative. So let’s just not do that. We’re going to build a team that is 80-85 people at peak.” The two also identify the sensitivity of the issue and is opening positions to virtually any individual who thinks they are eligible to apply.

Audio technician, QA management, and office manager some of the positions listed with all offering remote roles to work during the pandemic. McCoy also emphasizes on the severity of crunch by stating that Gravity Well will be the antithesis of what other studios in the industry still operate with.

This is not the first we have seen veteran developers founding their own studio to morph the basis for the next-generation of games. Raphael Colantonio and Julien Roby did the same in late 2019 with the opening of WolfEye Studio. You can read the full announcement by heading here.

Source: Gravity Well