Sumo Digital, the U.K. developer currently working on Crackdown 3 and Dead Island 2, has acquired CCP Games’ Newcastle studio, which had previously worked on Eve Online spinoff Eve: Valkyrie.
In an official announcement, Sumo says they’ve taken on 34 CCP staff members who will remain in New Castle with Owen O’Brien as Studio Director. O’Brien joined CCP in 2013 as executive producer of the fledgling Valkyrie, coming from EA’s DICE studio in Stockholm.
”Sumo Digital is a great home for the team in Newcastle,” said Hilmar Veigar Pétursson, CEO of CCP Games. “As we say goodbye to our former colleagues we know that they will do great things there, and we can’t wait to see what they do next.”
Paul Porter, Managing Director of Sumo Digital said, “As we continue to expand this was a great opportunity to bring an experienced, talented and tight-knit team on board.”
Sumo is most recently known for their puzzle platform game Snake Pass (2017), and has worked on a number of sequels to big franchises such as Forza, Little Big Planet, Crackdown, and Sonic.
Sumo Digital has a long history of working with major publishers on everything from smartphone ports of popular titles to even creating sequels to some of the biggest series in the industry such as LittleBigPlanet 3 and the upcoming Crackdown 3. Recently, the developer released its very own title, Snake Pass. It’s not yet known if Sumo plans to develop VR content with its new team, though we’ve reached out to ask the company. The team might not be able to work on Valkyrie anymore, but it’s still hugely experienced within the VR industry.
CCP Games Newcastle could be considered one of if not the first VR-focused developers in the world. Valkyrie, which puts players in the cockpit of ships first seen in CCP’s ever-popular EVE Online MMO, was first revealed in 2013, nearly three years before the launch of the Oculus Rift headset it released on. Since launch in March 2016, the game has seen numerous expansion updates and arrived on both the HTC Vive and PlayStation VR (PSVR) with cross-play support. In its most recent update, the game added support for traditional displays, too. We’ve also reached out to CCP’s main branch to ask what the future of Valkyrie looks like.
CCP announced it was pulling out of VR back in October, closing down its Atlanta-based studio that developed the recently-released Sparc.
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