Hello hello!
And welcome to another week on The Game Business.
You may have noticed we’ve changed the name of our Monday morning edition. It used to be called ‘The Game Business Micro’, and now we’ve gone with the sillier (but more accurate) ‘Here’s The Dring’.
When we started doing the Micro, it was just a news round-up. It was running through the stories of the previous seven days and providing you with the information you’d need for the week ahead.
We still do that, but it’s changed over time. Now, the bulk of the ‘Micro’ is original analysis, opinion and (sometimes) data. What’s more, although the podcast is still (relatively) short, the newsletter is actually quite chunky. So, I felt the name ‘Micro’ was both inaccurate and undersold what we were making. Hence the new name.
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There are load of stories in this week’s edition, and the two I’ve focused on includes Netflix’s surprising decision to close its best studio, and 2K’s equally surprising decision to open a new sports developer in the same city as EA Sports.
Let’s dive in!
2K opens a sports developer on EA’s lawn… is it making a football game?
In Brief: 2K Games has launched Small Axe Studios. The new developer is led by EA Sports veterans and is based in the same city: Vancouver, Canada. The team is building the ‘next blockbuster sports franchise’ and wants to ‘redefine the future of sports video games’.
What You Need To Know:
The studio is made up of former EA Sports development leaders including VP and executive producer Aaron McHardy (EA Sports FC, Madden), head of design Gary Paterson (FIFA, NBA Live), head of operations Tom Pan (FIFA, UFC, SSX), head of engineering Mike Thompson (NHL, UFC), and technical art director John Cruz (FIFA, NBA, Skate).
Other key hires include head of HR Trisha MacWan (Glu Mobile), animation director Brend Breedveld (Relic Entertainment) and art director Karl Gryc (Blackbird Interactive).
2K is already a major player in sports games, and is responsible for the NBA 2K, WWE 2K and PGA 2K franchises. Its main sports studio is Visual Concepts, which dates back to 1998 and was originally owned by Sega.
Many of the people working for Small Axe worked on the EA Sports FC/FIFA series, giving rise to the expectation that this developer is creating a new football/soccer game.
The company’s name is due to the belief that ‘with vision, drive, and focus, a small axe can take down a big tree’.
The studio came out of 2K Sports Lab, which was set-up in 2023 to research and develop future sports games.
My Take:
When EA ditched the FIFA licence in 2023 and rebranded its game as ‘EA Sports FC’, the football governing body was defiant.
FIFA president Gianni Infantino declared that the group would be back, and that “the only authentic, real game that has the FIFA name will be the best one available“.
“Not a chance,” I said at the time. FIFA might have some success on mobile around the World Cup, and the FIFA World Cup cloud game that Netflix commissioned was an interesting idea… but ‘the only authentic, real game’? No way.
