Seattle’s game development officially welcomes a new challenger this week: First Strike Games, a multiplayer-focused studio founded by a group of longtime game developers who most recently worked together at Halo developer 343 Industries.
What’s interesting here is that the three of the four studio founders (the fourth being DDM founder and former leader Jeff Hilbert) had prominent roles developing the multiplayer components of Halo 5: Guardians, and now they’ve founded a studio which takes “we make multiplayer” as its mission statement.
That stands in stark contrast to the work of System Era, a fellow Seattle-based studio staffed by some ex-343i devs who left 343 specifically because they wanted to do something different: the colorful astronaut survival game Astroneer.
“If you want to make a game like Halo you don’t quit 343,” System Era cofounder Jacob Liechty told Gamasutra last year.
But First Strike’s goal seems to be putting the skills its founders honed at 343 to work on their own projects, as the studio notes it is “engaged in publisher and investor discussions to develop a PC/Console multiplayer game.”