Three employees from the Metroid Prime developed Retro Studios have announced the opening of their new studio, Armature.
Mark Pacini, Todd Keller and Jack Mathews left Retro in April however today the team announced an exclusive publishing deal with Electronic Arts.
Reported by Kotaku, Armature will join EA’s Blueprint Division. Rather than making games, the studio will spend its time developing prototypes. Once a prototype was approved for game development, the work will be transferred to another studio while Armature remains on board as directors.
“EA approached us with this really interesting business model of creating a small studio that is only comprised of industry veterans,”
“The goal is to create new IP [intellectual property] with a very, very small team and to produce a game without having to grow that team.”
“We are interested to see how it goes past the prototype stage,”
“Our studio is the grand experiment. It’s kind of a really different take on how to make these larger scale games.”
– Mark Pacini, Armature Studios Game Director
Armature is now hiring by the way.