Titanfall veterans form new games studio

Experienced developers who worked on games like Titanfall and Apex Legends have left EA to start their own development studio.

Games industry veterans who worked on games like Titanfall, Apex Legends, and Call of Duty have left EA’s Respawn Entertainment to start their own studio.

The new studio is called Wildlight Entertainment, and is headed up by Dusty Welch and Jason McCord, two developers who were instrumental in bringing Titanfall and Apex Legends to life.

Welch acted as the chief operating officer at Respawn Entertainment for eight years, and was the general manager of Apex Legends’ development team. He also helped create Call of Duty, having worked at Activision for 13 years.

McCord on the other hand started in the games industry in 2004 at Call of Duty developer Treyarch, before moving on to Respawn in 2010. There, he worked as a senior level designer on Titanfall, the lead designer on Titanfall 2, and the design director on Apex Legends, before leaving the company after 11 years.

Wildlight Entertainment revealed its new logo alongside the company. Picture: Wildlight Entertainment

Wildlight is said to be a “remote first” development studio, and the studio’s website says that the company is “fully-funded”, and that it will focus on creating big new games. What kind of games the company will be making is anybody’s guess, the studio didn’t specify, but given the history of much of the staff, a first person shooter probably isn’t off the table.

“We are a new, fully-funded entertainment studio hyperfocused on creating big, bold, original gaming universes of epic quality and scale,” the website says, “We’ve been quietly working on a new IP for some time, and while it’ll be a bit before we can say more, we’re beyond excited for what’s to come”.

Wildlight says it’s a remote-first company, but has offices that employees can work at if they choose. Picture: Wildlight Entertainment

As noted by Eurogamer, another of the staff to join the studio is former Respawn developer Mohammad Alavi, who worked on both Titanfall games, and was reportedly working on a new Titanfall game that EA cancelled.

It comes after EA announced it was also cancelling two mobile games, an in-development Battlefield game and Apex Legends Mobile, a game that was released just eight months prior to its shutdown date. The company says that the increasingly poor quality of updates for Apex Legends Mobile was the reason the game was shut down.

Written by Oliver Brandt on behalf of GLHF.