Former Respawn Developers Establish AAA Studio Gravity Well - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 11 May 2020 / 2,122 Views
Drew McCoy and Jon “Slothy” Shiring, who formerly worked at Respawn Entertainment, have announced the formation of a new AAA video game development studio, called Gravity Well. The studio is based in Las Angeles, California.
McCoy and Shiring worked at Respawn from May 2010 to February 2020. McCoy was the senior producer on Titanfall 2 and executive producer on Apex Legends. Shiring was the senior programmer on Titanfall, and lead programmer on Titanfall 2 and Apex Legends.
Read a message from Drew McCoy below:
A STUDIO FOR THE LONG HAUL
Hi! I'm Drew, and I'm stoked to start a new studio here in LA with Slothy. We've been making games together for a long time and have learned a ton about ways to lead teams and ship games. 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.
We prefer to cut and focus down so we only ship what we love.
If this sounds like an adventure that you want to join we're looking forward to hearing from you!
Read a message from Jon “Slothy” Shiring below:
A SMALLER AAA TEAM
Okay, Slothy here. I just pried the keyboard away from Drew.
Ask around, and you'll get the same answer from devs - 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. 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.
We aren’t satisfied with the low level of creative risk that gets project funding these days. We want to explore bold new ideas exclusively for next-gen hardware and PCs.
Given the COVID-19 pandemic, we're starting the studio for remote work from the very start. Since one of the core values of Gravity Well is increased diversity, we're excited about not being hamstrung by relocation or work visa issues. We want to hire the best talent in the industry, regardless of where you live.
We're excited to build this new team and we hope that you're interested, too. If now isn't the right time, reach out anyway and we can just have a nice conversation. If you work in games, we'd love to hear from you.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel dedicated to gaming Let's Plays and tutorials. You can contact the author at wdangelo@vgchartz.com or on Twitter @TrunksWD.
More Articles
I'd love if they were to make more story based games. EA basically owns REspawn now, which have them working on either a Souls-like game or an entirely MP based one, neither of which appeals to me.
Interesting. They have the pedigree, so maybe we will see something interesting popping up in a couple of years.
