Forza Horizon 5 Creative Director Founds Studio Maverick Games With Other Playground Games Alumni


Forza Horizon Although the setting changes with each new episode, Mike Brown felt it was time to change the air for good. To accompany him in the creation of his studio, Maverick Games, the creative director is joined by other Playground Games alumni, including executive producer Tom Butcher, technical director Matt Craven, technical art director Gareth Harwood and director Fraser Strachan audio. The starting team, which currently only has 10 people, also includes artistic director Ben Penrose from Sharkmob (but who also knew Playground Games from August 2011 to September 2017) and Elly Marshall, a rookie from Codemasters who will take care of user interface issues (and who also had a look at Playground Games in 2014/2015, definitely). The team presentation wouldn’t be complete without mentioning Harinder Sangha, alumnus of Sega, Codemasters and Sumo Digital who will serve as the studio’s COO, leaving Mike Brown to focus on the creative work.

An open-world game, but not necessarily driving

Maverick Games is not here to discover the life of a modest independent craftsman. Already well helped by a generous investor based in London, the studio intends on the contrary to reach the bar of 140 employees as quickly as possible in order to produce an AAA game in the open world which will be released on consoles and PC. To announce its creation with great fanfare and attract the attention of applicants, the studio can count on an interview prepared with Games Industry in which we are obviously told that it will be good to live in a work culture that promotes decision-making. creative risks and benevolent exchanges.

The studio isn’t ready to talk about the game it’s making, but despite the team’s very car-oriented resume, there’s every reason to believe the game won’t be about vehicles. “Before being someone who loves driving, I would clearly describe myself as a guy who loves open worlds above all“, indicates Mike Brown. “The game will be open world, it will be AAA, it will be premium, it will have the ambition to win all the prizes“, he adds.

Subscriptions and the “struggle for attention”

In the same interview, Mike Brown wrote some interesting things about the rise of subscriptions like PlayStation Plus and Xbox Game Pass and what these on-demand catalogs are changing creatively. Having already seen his Forza Horizon 5 become the largest launch audience for an Xbox Game Studios game thanks to Xbox Game Pass, the man is well placed to talk about it and remembers that being so easily accessible does not make things easier. On the contrary, Mike Brown believes that a game intended for a subscription must be all the more eye-catching to attract a user who has not needed to buy it. “What this causes for us as game makers is a real fight for player attention. Because their commitment to you is just one click away. They didn’t have to go to a store or pay extra…like when I was a kid and had to save up for three months to buy an N64 game“, he explains.

The rest of his statement transcribes quite well the philosophy of a game like Forza Horizon 5 and perhaps at the same time the one that will be at the center of the first game from Maverick Games. “Beyond the game’s intro, which has to be spectacular, you have to stay in this fight for attention. I saw a stat that the average time spent watching a TikTok video is three seconds. It’s hard to build a game for a three-second attention span. It’s probably impossible. But games have to be able to compete with that access to entertainment, that access to fun. So we have to create games that always speak to each player, that always give them something to do, that never let them get to that point in the game where everything will repeat itself for 15 hours until the credits roll.



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