Pipeworks launches triple-A Timbre Games studio in Vancouver

Pipeworks Studios has opened a new studio in Vancouver known as Timbre Games. It will focus on action-adventure and simulation games for the Computer and consoles.

Electronic Arts veteran and former Sims franchise leader Joe Nickolls will lead as studio president. It will be a new division inside Eugene, Oregon-based Pipeworks Studios, which was acquired last year by Sumo Group for $one hundred million. The studio is staying mum about the game it is producing correct now.

Lindsay Gupton, CEO of Pipeworks Studios, stated in an interview with GamesBeat that the Sumo deal gave Pipeworks sources to mount an expansion, and that led to the creation of Timbre Games, exactly where the focus will be creating a new type of game studio exactly where diversity, transparency, neighborhood, and wholesome workplace culture will be in its DNA.

“I think from our perspective, Pipeworks has always had ambitions to be a really significant developer in North America,” Gupton stated. “We’ve been a part of Sumo for eight months and that has enabled us to reach those ambitions. We want to go and create and help create other studios, mostly by backing great teams to do cool stuff in interesting places. And so with this team, it worked out perfectly. This is kind of our first commitment to a significant expansion and international work, and Vancouver makes a sense of being in the same timezone.”

Timbre Games’ other employees contain studio production director Zoë Curnoe (who worked on the Gears of War series) and studio inventive director Geoff Coates (Company of Heroes 2).

Core but not hardcore

Nickolls has 22 years of knowledge in triple-A game development, and he was earlier vice president of Maxis at EA. He also held senior roles in inside EA Sports, EA Mobile, Capcom, and Microsoft.

“We plan to be a core studio, but hardcore is probably not the term,” Nickolls stated. “We’re going to lean into action adventure and simulation,, but we are not going to be doing extremely violent games or anything like that. We really want to make sure that we can provide accessible content for people across the board.”

Nickolls stated in an interview that he and Gupton met at the Game Developers Conference a even though ago and talked about their shared vision for games. Fast forward a couple of years and they’re beginning a studio collectively.

“One of the things that we bonded over is the idea of making games more fun for more people,” Nickolls stated. “We’re doing very high-quality games, but we want millions and millions of people to join because it’s accessible. We really want to make it easy for people to have an awesome experience and be awesome.”

Nickolls stated he liked the experimental nature and creativity of Sack Boy as an adventure game that appeals to everyone, as effectively as games with a weird sense of humor.

Pipeworks DNA

Based in Eugene, Oregon, Pipeworks has been a quiet worldwide force in gaming for more than 20 years. Its group has worked on more than 75 games with partners like EA Sports, Wizards of the Coast, Activision, Facebook, NASA, MetaTeq, and more. Timbre is Pipeworks’ 1st new studio in North America and plans to launch further studios in the close to future.

Gupton stated Pipeworks was inspired by the team’s vision and confident they will not only generate actually exciting games but do so in an inclusive atmosphere exactly where voices are heard and personnel thrive. Pipeworks most lately worked with Genvid Technologies on the interactive reality show Rival Peak.

Gupton stated the Pipeworks group enjoyed working on Rival Peak, which took games into new territory with interaction amongst game makers and audiences. The game revolved about 12 AI characters on a survival show in the wilderness. Those characters could be controlled in some style by the way the audience voted on important choices that the characters had to make.

“It was a kind of crazy experiment and a new form of entertainment,” Gupton stated.

Pipeworks focuses on development and co-development with publishers as its partners. It also does original intellectual home development and publishing.

“You can think of Timbre as being another development studio within the family that will have a similar model. It’s like working on originals as well as working on partner IP,” Gupton stated.

Nickolls expects the studio will help remote work with hybrid in-particular person and remote model. Nickolls stated the group is working on a couple of concepts now but can not speak about them however.

Cofounders

Curnoe was most lately the production director of the story campaign for the Gears of War series at The Coalition. Her part as a producer has taken her to significant and smaller studios worldwide, from Canada’s Rocky Mountains (The Banff Centre for the Arts) to Australia, working for Pandemic/EA and California at Riot Games.

Coates worked on art and inventive director for Company of Heroes (Relic), DeadRising 4 (Capcom), and the SSX franchise (EA). Coates has worked on anything from sports titles to tactic games to shooters and racing games. His side hustles contain editorial cartoons for a Vancouver paper and relentlessly drawing Nickolls in unprofessional (however somehow tasteful) workplace attire.

Diversity focus

Timbre is committed to searching tougher and additional for talent with unique backgrounds and will companion with neighborhood schools and communities to bring in diverse voices. Timbre has 5 men and women now and it is hiring.

“When you build a studio, you’re really given a unique opportunity to try and build things the right way,” Nickolls stated. “One of the things that we’re really going to be focusing on is making sure that we have diversity. We are equally as excited about bringing in studio veterans as we are bringing in fresh new talent from different backgrounds and groups to to really help us take advantage of the changing faces of gaming.”

Part of Timbre’s mission is to method game development with the neighborhood in thoughts correct from the starting, even in generating and expanding a new studio. Its target is to involve players a great deal earlier, focusing on early access and neighborhood feedback. Pipeworks has more than 160 personnel, mainly in Eugene.

The parent business

Sumo Group’s corporations provide acclaimed development, style and publishing services to the video games and entertainment industries from studios in the United Kingdom, India, Canada, the US, and Poland.

Sumo Digital, as the group’s main enterprise, is one of the United Kingdom’s biggest independent developers of triple-rated video games, with studios in Sheffield, Newcastle, Nottingham, Leamington Spa, Warrington, and Pune, India.

The enterprise has acquired a number of studios considering that initial public providing (IPO), which operate below their personal names, BAFTA award-winning The Chinese Room in Brighton, Red Kite Games in Leeds, Lab42 in Leamington Spa and PixelAnt Games in Wroclaw, Poland.

Originally appeared on: TheSpuzz