Might and Magic Creator Founds New Mobile Studio
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The editors at GamesIndustry.biz bring word that Jon Van Caneghem has founded a new mobile studio and has been hard at work over the past year on a new title that's at least inspired by the Might and Magic franchise he created years ago. The article suggests that the studio's first game will be an RPG or strategy/RPG hybrid, but we'll keep an eye out for the inevitable announcement in the coming weeks/months and make a determination then on whether it makes sense to cover it further on GameBanshee:
The list of games in Van Caneghem's portfolio is too long to reproduce here, but as well as the Might And Magic franchise it includes the Heroes Of Might And Magic series, Empire II: The Art of War and the Heroes Chronicles series. He also spent time at Electronic Arts working on a Command & Conquer title but the studio was closed before the game could be released.
He's not ready to talk about the game he's making just yet, but from the hints above you can guess the genre. The game will be released later this year and he sees its target market as all gamers.
"I think it's a matter of adjusting the type of game for the play sessions and the type of play style," he says. He goes on to explain that the development process for mobile, the constant iteration, is pretty familiar to a veteran of the industry.
"This really reminds me of some earlier PC games days - it's a smaller team, less of a giant budget and there's a lot more chance to iterate, there's a lot more chance to be creative. And that's why I view this as such an exciting time for game design and development. It's not a 200-person, four-year endeavour to build a product."
To help that development process, the studio used its stealth period (it's been secretly busy for around a year) to secure a Series A investment round worth $4.5 million that included investments from Tencent and Pacific Sky Investments.
"It's made a big difference. Obviously the mobile space is crowded and has a lot of noise and to be able to rise above that was important. We wanted to raise the production values so that's helping with that.
