Blizzard veterans, including those who worked on Warcraft 3 and StarCraft 2, have formed their new game development studio.
Named Frost Giant Studios, the new independent studio based in Orange County, California has revealed its team members on Tuesday, October 20. Coincidentally, the lineup reveals shortly follows Blizzard's major announcement last week. It has announced that StarCraft 2, one of the largest remaining real-time strategy titles, will no longer have new content, although the developers assured its fanbase that fixes and balances will still arrive as needed. The announcement follows the game's tenth year anniversary.
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Meet the Team
In the introduction video, running at a little over three minutes, the Frost Giant team shared their motivations for moving out of Blizzard and into the new indie studio. Most of them specifically aim to help bring "the next big RTS." The developers introduced are:
Ryan Schutter, Lead UI Designer. He was a designer for StarCraft 2 and developed GameHeart, Blizzard's extension mod for SC II.
Kevin Dong, Lead Co-Op Designer. He held the same position for StarCraft 2 and served as the Project Manager for Team Liquid.
Jesse Brophy, Art Director. Brophy served as lead artist for SC II and principal artist for Diablo 4.
Austin Hudelson, Lead Server Engineer. Hudelson was a server engineer for SC II.
Joe Shunk, Lead Client Engineer. Shunk was formerly a gameplay engineer for StarCraft 2 and Warcraft 3: Reforged.
Cara LaForge, Business Operations Lead. She was Blizzard Esports' senior program manager.
Tim Cambell, Game Director, and Company President. He served as the game director for Wasteland 3 and lead campaign designer for Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne.
Tim Morten, Production Director, and CEO. He was the production director for StarCraft 2 and Command & Conquer Generals 2.
"When you know some people with that singularity of purpose, it really makes you wanna kind of join in with them," Shunk explained after knowing that his colleagues at Blizzard were working on a new RTS studio.
In The Footsteps of Giants
On their company website, Frost Giant states that its mission "is to build the next great PC real-time strategy game. Building on its members' backgrounds, the new indie studio claims that it is now their turn to carry forward the qualities that made RTS a hit genre - "epic storytelling, innovative co-op gameplay, and celebrated esports."
Frost Giant was supported by a number of well-known venture capital investors in the industry - Bitkraft Ventures, 1Up Ventures, GC Tracker, and Griffin Gaming Partners. Also, the new RTS developer is backed by Riot Games, the video game publisher behind hit games such as League of Legends and Valorant.
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Blizzard Entertainment, the former company for most of Frost Giant employees, is an American game developer based in Irvine, California. Since it was founded in February 1991, it has released some of the largest real-time strategy titles - most notably the sci-fi StarCraft and the fantasy-themed Warcraft series. Also, Blizzard has role-playing titles including the hack-and-slash Diablo franchise and the hit first-person shooter Overwatch.
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