I mentioned in an earlier Comm-Link that we are planning on having the core development of Star Citizen happen in
three locations – Los Angeles, Californa, Austin, Texas and Montreal, Canada.
There are quite a few reasons why Montreal is interesting – there is a lot of
game development talent: Ubisoft, Warner Bros, EA and THQ all have large
development studios and games such as the Assassin’s Creed series, Far Cry 2 & 3 and
Deus Ex Revolutions have all come out of Montreal. There are a fair amount of
developers with CryEngine experience (the Far Cry series is built on a modified
version of the original CryEngine and THQ has been working on a couple of
unannounced CryEngine projects.) Finally, all your dollars go much further in Montreal
than they do in Austin and Los Angeles due to the strong government support
for game development and the lower cost of living. This allows us to pack more
ships,
locations and features in than we could if we just built the game in Los
Angeles and Austin.
As part of the year of preparation, research and development I did in building
the prototype I was testing out workflow concepts and personnel. Montreal was
an area that I knew from making films (which the Canadian and Quebec
governments also support strongly), so it was an area I considered right from the start.
I weighed several options, from building a studio from scratch to partnering
with an established studio to help build out a team. Considering everything else
that we need to accomplish with Star Citizen I decided that it was smarter to
partner with someone that all ready has an infrastructure and is up and running,
much the same way I would contract with a local production service company if
I was making a film.
Behaviour Interactive are the biggest independent developer in Montreal, with
a great infrastructure and work process. They have worked on over 130 games
with some of the biggest publishers in the industry, have a reputation for being
on time and budget and have many people that worked on big AAA titles like
Assassins Creed or Far Cry 3 (Ubisoft contracted them to help out the recently
shipped Far Cry 3.)
Over the last year they contributed some resources on spec to flesh out some
of the technical design on the server back end (Behaviour designed, built and
maintains Nickelodeon’s kid’s MMO, Monkey Quest, which has over 10 million
users) and help build the prototype as a test to see if we could work well together
and they could meet the quality standards I want to hit for Star Citizen. If
you liked the prototype you’ve already seen some of their work and approved.
Because of this I’m happy to announce formally that Behaviour Interactive will be
our partner in Montreal, Canada. You can read the complete press release here
(
http://robertsspaceindustries.us5.l...1243db6075c45571bd&id=d74d27f3eb&e=70855929b1 ) .